
" I II I Ail I mii i I i'i' ni ii<-if irinirlTifiriM n 




Class. 
Book.. 



CfiPXRlGRT DEPOSm 



/ 



FAMILIAR WAYS 



FAMILIAR WAYS 



BY 



MARGARET SHERWOOD 



non-referT 




SWVAD*Q3SJ 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1917 






Copyright^ 1917^ 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 



All rights reserved 
Published September, 1917 




Nortoooft ^ress 

Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Gushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 

Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A. 



SEP 29 1917 



G1.A476294 

4.' 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Thanks are due to the editor of The Atlantic 
Monthly for permission to reprint "The Little 
House", "Our Venetian Lamp", "House- 
Cleaning", "It is Well to be off with the Old 
House before you are on with the New", "Our 
Nearest, — and Farthest, — Neighbors " ; to 
the editor of Scribner^s Magazine for permission 
to reprint "The Vegetable Self", "A Sab- 
batical Year", "Real Estate", "Plain Coun- 
try", "Gardens, Real and Imagined", "Brother 
Fire", "The Threshold", "Old Trails", 
"The Final Packing" ; and to the editor of the 
Vassar Alumnce Quarterly for permission to 
reprint "The Comradeship of Trees." 



CONTENTS 

FAOB 

The Little House 1 

Our Venetian Lamp . . ... . 9 

House-Cleaning 17 

The Vegetable Self 29 

The Sabbatical Year 37 

It is Well to be off with the Old House before 

You ARE ON WITH THE NeW .... 44 

Real Estate 52 

Our Nearest, — and Farthest, — Neighbors . 60 

Plain Country 88 

Gardens, Real and Imagined .... 100 

The Comradeship of Trees .... 121 

Brother Fire 144 

The Threshold 161 

Old Trails 175 

The Final Packing 193 



FAMILIAR WAYS 



THE LITTLE HOUSE 

If we had known that it was going to prove 
such a tyrant we should never have taken it, 
as we did, for better or worse. It looked so 
gentle and confiding in its setting of green 
grass and apple trees the morning when we 
first saw it, that we could not resist the spell. 
The old-fashioned windows gave it an expres- 
sion of which one reads in impassioned novels, 
making me feel as if the house and I had met 
and become one in the infinite earlier than 
time. It coaxed us with that feminine ap- 
peal almost impossible to withstand. The 
closed door and locked sashes, the grass in the 
walk, hinted at loneliness, suggested that we 
could understand; and so, because of its 

1 



2 FAMILIAR WAYS 

quaintness, and the pathos of the hollowed 
doorstep, we took it for our own. 

Doubtless the strong hold upon us was partly 
due to helplessness, for it was constantly ap- 
pealing, in new kinds of need, as a child would. 
I had no idea that it would mean so much 
trouble; so small and sturdy and independent 
a thing would, I thought, more than half take 
care of itself. Oh, the work and the worry 
that have been expended on this diminutive 
house ! The tasks it has thought up, the sud- 
den needs wherewith it has confronted us! 
It has invention infinite in keeping itself be- 
fore our minds. Chief among its devices is 
an air of suffering from neglect if we but ven- 
ture out of its sight. Never have I failed to 
turn the last corner leading homeward with 
a leaping of the heart in fear of what may have 
happened. Suppose that it were gone, by fire 
or by flood; suppose it had never really been 
there, being but a dream, a figment of the 
imagination wherein my spirit has been resting, 
as at an inn, before the long journey begins 
again. The corner turned, there is always 



THE LITTLE HOUSE 3 

something reassuring in the touch of my fin- 
ger on the latch, telling me that the little house 
is still there, really there. When I grow angry 
at the tyrant for the homely tasks it suggests, 
the constant watchfulness it demands, it looks 
upon me with a mild expression of ancient wis- 
dom about the roof, as one who, from old time, 
has known and pitied all fluctuations of human 
mood. There is something of eternal wisdom 
about a roof -line; when did man first learn to 
lift roofs against the stars? 

I have fallen into the habit, as one always 
does with feminine creatures, of taking home 
things to please it, and I marvel at the person- 
ality which dominates its caprice. Now and 
then it disdains an offering for this or that 
corner, scorning a long-meditated gift; again 
it will seize upon some insignificant thing, for 
wise, inscrutable purposes, making it beautiful 
as part of itself, so that one could almost swear 
that the little house has organic life. Lately 
it has refused to shelter perfectly reputable 
reproductions of the old masters; certain Ma- 
donnas heretofore tolerated it will no longer 



4 FAMILIAR WAYS 

live with. On the other hand, the long strip 
of ecclesiastical embroidery, harmoniously 
faded, purchased, after much haggling, at the 
Rag Market at Rome, it has graciously ac- 
cepted, as it did the antique lamp of bronze. 
Pictures of trees, and of waves breaking upon 
shores far and near it eagerly invites. Books 
it indulgently allows in any numbers, — all 
but elaborate gift books, — as who should 
say, "All people must have their vices, and 
yours is fairly innocent." Such charity be- 
comes it well, for itself hath vice, a ruinous, 
consuming thirst for old mahogany, a passion 
that may yet lead us to the debtor's prison, or 
its modern substitute, whatever that may be. 
The measure of its hold upon me is the depth 
of its understanding; at first glance I knew 
that it was simpatica, as the Italians say. In 
those tired moments when one shrinks from 
human beings, the companionship of the quiet 
corner is all in all, and there is no such rest 
elsewhere as comes from watching the shadows 
of the woodbine flicker in the moonlight upon 
the old-fashioned mirror by the window. In 



THE LITTLE HOUSE 5 

times of grief it knows that nothing else can 
comfort; one learns in its wise silences. How 
many births and deaths it has lived through 
I do not know, but lately we have seen how 
wide its narrow door may swing upon eternity. 
Living through many lives, gleaning long expe- 
rience, the little house seems — as one who has 
known it all before — to fold mere individual 
sorrows in the long sorrow of the race. 

In such manifold ways of giving and de- 
manding it has so tightened its hold upon us 
that we wear its bonds on hand and foot. The 
moment of strongest contest of will between 
us came with our need of going far away. 
The little house put its foot down, insisting 
that we should go nowhere that it could not 
go. It dominated, coaxed, said that it needed 
care, was sorrowful, and sometimes merely 
silent, suggesting that it knew perfectly well 
we could not get away from it if we tried. 
As usual, it was right. What messengers 
it sends ! Now subtle ones : quivering aspen 
twig or blown leaf of autumn suddenly re- 
minds us that we cannot go beyond its creep- 



6 FAMILIAR WAYS 

ing shadow. Though we fare over leagues 
of sea, we get no farther than its chimney; 
great Jupiter swings across the eastern sky 
to lead us to the elm tree by the back door. 
In Grasmere's lovely green and gray of storied 
mountain pasture, which almost persuade us 
that we have wandered into another world 
of too delicate beauty to be called part of 
earth, the sudden howl of a street musician, — 

" There 's a h'old fashioned cottage, with h'ivy 
round the door, — ** 

going on to certain statements about a sanded 
floor, and the assertion, — 

" Where'er I roam I will always think of home, — " 

compels us back. 

When I waken, watching the sunlight flood 
Pentelicon, dim blue against the clear gold 
of a Grecian dawn, I feel the little house tug- 
ging softly at my heartstrings, just a slight 
tug, to say, "You may have your fling, but 
you cannot escape me; sooner or later you 
will come back." At Agamemnon's awful 
threshold I think upon my own, and Argive 



THE LITTLE HOUSE 7 

Hera's ruined doorway fills me with longing 
for humbler portals not yet battered down. 
It is hard to tread always another's stairs, 
even though they be the exquisite carven 
marble stairways of the chateau-land; and 
the sheepfolds of Scotch hills or wide French 
plains bring a sudden sinking of the heart 
to one who wanders far, unfolded yet. Ah, 
yes, however far we stray into the storied 
past, the little house puts its finger on us and 
we come. 

It makes no reproaches for our having 
gone, but it does not quite admit us to its 
old confidence, or as yet go back to its old 
ways. Watchful, seemingly indifferent, it waits 
aloof, yet still it stands, as heretofore, with 
that look of immemorial wisdom, making 
the old demands. Soon will come the old 
concessions, and the earlier understanding. 

What will be the end I do not know, but 
this spot of earth seems to have laid its spell 
upon me for life, and yet beyond. Long ago, 
one summer night of opened windows, with 
cool leaves just beyond, silent as the stars, 



8 FAMILIAR WAYS 

I dreamed of lying under the turf of the door- 
yard, and of being taken back, in wholly 
pleasant fashion, into the elements, immeas- 
urably rested from myself by being absorbed 
into green living grass. 



OUR VENETIAN LAMP 

It was made in the fashion of the lamps 
of Saint Mark's, a flat disk of bronze open- 
work holding a cup of dull red glass for olive 
oil, with a pineapple-shaped pendant below, 
all hung by wrought bronze chains. When 
we looked at it first, it seemed as if it would 
bring into our New England home something 
of the dim glory of the old cathedral, glowing 
faintly, like the inside of some ancient jewel, 
with the clear small light of its sacred lamps 
just breaking its lasting twilight. Doubtless 
we thought, too, of the impression that it would 
make upon our village, which is ever awake 
to a sense of the aesthetic. There were a few 
dollars left after purchasing, in a little shop 
behind the cathedral, the lace doylies which 
have lately met deep appreciation from 
our neighbors, and we eagerly purchased the 

9 



10 FA:\nLL\Il ^YAYS 

bronze lamp. Oiir vote, made up of two 
voices, is almost never a tie. 

It was a curious walk that we took to get 
it, along the side of green canals, over minia- 
ture carved bridges, led bv the und^^g charm 
of Old Venice : not the Venice of the Grand 
Canal, overrun by foreign folk, desecrated 
by steamboats, but the ancient city, whose 
sequestered life still goes on in her piazzette 
and in tiny shops peeping out from under 
dark-browed houses. To her belong white- 
haired cobblers, busily tapping in their tiny 
spaces six feet by five; brown, wrinkled, age- 
less dames guarding tiny stores of peaches, 
cherries, plums, in almost imperceptible mar- 
kets. It seemed to us, as we bargained for 
the lamp in a dusky Kttle shop all agleam 
with bronze and things of brass, that a glimpse 
of it would at any moment summon before 
us the beauty of fading colors and fretted 
outHnes in this city of the sea. 

How we packed it, with its chains, and 
its curving, bulky pendant, so beautiful when 
hanging from the ceiling, so impossible in a 



OUR VENETIAN LAMP 11 

trunk; how it wrinkled our garments and 
made holes in them, I leave to the imagination 
of the reader. All seemed of small account 
when we saw it hanging in our hall, where 
it lent, we thought, a grace of other worlds 
and earlier days — though it was palpably 
new — to a rigid American stairway, and a 
wall-paper a bit antique without being there- 
fore lovely. It gave an air of permanence 
to the place, even to the oaken coat-hanger 
which had been put up by feminine hands 
and which invariably came down with the 
coat. What though our fingers were often 
sticky with olive oil, as we dived vainly with 
a pair of inadequate tin pincers for the floating 
wicks that would not float .^^ A dimly red, 
religious light pervaded our hall, and, if we 
tried hard enough, it transported us to 
Venice. 

The dim light had its disadvantages, nor 
did it always lead caller or hostess into a 
religious mood. Incoming and outgoing guests 
sometimes collided, and it fostered in us an 
already marked tendency to call people by 



n FAMILIAR WAYS 

wrong names. Sometimes it went out alto- 
gether, and our friends stepped from our 
lighted sitting-room into total darkness, kicked 
our little mahogany table, and ran into the 
umbrella-stand. The climax of trouble, how- 
ever, came in the insane tendency developed 
by all comers to run into our lamp. No 
June bug is more persistent in bumping into 
electric-light bulbs than were one and all in 
heading for our sacred flame ; and lard oil — 
for olive oil had been pronounced too expen- 
sive, and we never let our aesthetic longings 
betray us into rashness in our village — dropped 
upon more than one head, more than one 
hat. The clergyman went all too near, and 
drops of oil not sacred fell upon his head; an 
editor — and we esteem editors not less than 
clergymen — bore away unsightly drippings 
upon a silk hat too gallantly waved; young 
girls who were calling developed unexpected 
statures, — we could have sworn when it was 
hung that our lamp swung higher than any 
human head. This thing of bronze seemed 
to grow sensitive, vibrated to impassioned 



OUR VENETIAN LAMP 13 

farewells, and laughed joyously at fortunate 
partings. Yet we toiled over it gladly, — 
though wicks floated to the bottom, and matches 
broke and tumbled in, and the silly pincers 
would not work. Our maid, possibly because 
she was a Scotch Presbyterian, sternly re- 
fused to have anything to do with the object, 
except once when we found her secretly en- 
gaged with it in the kitchen : she had scoured 
all the manufactured look of age away from 
it with sapolio. 

Then a little girl friend came to spend an 
afternoon with us. I can see her now, with 
her golden curls, white dress, and her pink 
silk stockings, as she stood upon the stairs 
and swung the pretty lamp and laughed aloud. 
A new stair carpet was the result. Our guest 
went away, and we returned to the quiet of 
our little home, and to our sacred gloom, which 
was now partly of the mind. We had grown 
a bit nervous in our musings ; our low ques- 
tions, — "Doesn't it fairly make you see the 
green water in the canals?" or, "Can't you 
hear the gondolas gliding along?" — were 



14 FAMILIAR WAYS 

likely to be interrupted by a shriek: "Is that 
thing spilling over?" ( 

The crowning achievement of our Venetian 
lamp came one July night when we were 
awaiting two distinguished guests. It was 
burning softly, enveloping our whole cottage 
in an artistic atmosphere, and we congratu- 
lated ourselves, as we walked up and down 
in fresh white gowns, on how greatly our dis- 
tinguished guests would appreciate it. The 
house was spotless : did we not always try 
to keep it so? But was an added touch of 
polish too much for such visitors? 

At 9.30 we remembered that the mattress 
for the cot must be brought downstairs, our 
house — alas that I must confess the secrets 
of our housekeeping ! — having, in reality, 
room for but one distinguished guest, it being 
thus necessary for one hostess to sleep in the 
library. The maid, like a sensible woman, 
had gone to bed; had she been awake she 
would have saved us from this, as from many 
another folly. A brilliant idea occurred to 
us, for we are as fertile in inventive processes 



OUR VENETIAN LAMP 15 

as the Swiss Family Robinson or Robinson 
Crusoe, though our devices do not always work 
out, as did theirs, with automatic regularity to 
the advantage of the planner. The mattress, 
neatly curled, should roll downstairs. What 
is intelligence for, if not to save trouble? We 
started it; it leaped, sprang like a sentient 
thing, turned a somersault, stood upright, 
flung itself upon the lamp, which, as if touched 
to life, responded to the challenge, vital energy 
quivering along its speaking chains. And 
now ensued a mortal combat, to which only 
the pen of a Victor Hugo could do justice. 
It was such a fight as would have occurred if 
his memorable runaway cannon had indeed 
gone overboard into the water and there had 
encountered the octopus of The Toilers of the 
Sea. Tentacles leaped out from the lamp; 
the mattress hit back with all the power of 
its uncoiled strength : the swinging bronze bulb 
responded with a blow, pouring out — alas, no 
dragon of fairy story could hurl forth from its 
throat anything worse than lard oil ! 

The distinguished guests arrived at this 



16 FAMILIAR WAYS 

moment to find floor, ceiling, mattress, stairs, 
bespattered with oil. Villainous wicks from 
that villainous receptacle were lodged upon 
our best umbrellas, and even upon the backs 
of our necks, and greasy fragments of red glass 
were flung as far as the middle of the dining- 
room floor and out upon the walk. 

It was after the distinguished guests were 
gone, after the kalsominers and the carpet- 
man had finished, that we took our Venetian 
lamp and a gardening trowel and went to the 
far corner of our green yard, where already 
many precious things lie buried. There we 
dug a hole. There the Venetian lamp lies 
buried, by Fluff, who died in the prime of 
cathood, by her two kittens, who perished at 
five days old, by the baby bluebird that Rex 
caught, and by the squirrel, brought home 
from a snowbank, wounded to the death, to 
fade away upon our hands. Some future 
investigator, thousands of years hence, may 
dig it up, and exclaim over the beauty of taste 
of the aborigines. Perhaps he can afford 
aesthetic sensations; we cannot. 



HOUSE-CLEANING 



The old rite of spring house-cleaning is, 
I am told, falling into disuse, with the new 
improvements in household machinery. I can 
but regret its passing, for it would seem to 
have both practical and symbolic value, ally- 
ing itself with other spring observances which 
celebrate casting off the husks of the old, the 
coming of new life, when earth and human 
beings waken together to a fresh mood of hope 
and of vigor. Such were the Demeter festivals 
in the south ; in the north, those of the ancient 
pagan May Day, with their dances and fresh 
garlands; and other half -religious ceremonies 
which go back to the dawn of time. 

Here, in our quiet village, we hold to this 
grand spring purification, as we do to other 

17 



18 FAMILIAR WAYS 

old usages, in part spectators, in part actors 
therein, constantly stirred to meditation, quick- 
ened in memory. There are fingers astir in 
corners long untouched; there are shadowy 
cobwebs swept away. It is a fine sight to see, 
all down the street, on the green lawns, rugs 
being beaten, cushions shaken; windows are 
being washed; soap-suds are applied to the 
lintels of the doorways with almost sacerdotal 
fervor. Out on long lines hang many gar- 
ments airing in the sweet April sunshine; 
dusty things share for a time the life of fresh 
growing grass. The carpet-beating man is 
in constant requisition; he knows himself 
the most important personage in town, and 
wears his brief glory with a not unkingly air. 
There is great rivalry in regard to the scrub- 
women, who have inherited, if not all the joy- 
ousness of their dancing predecessors, singing 
in the spring, at least some of their activity. 
The painters are all too few, but busy on every 
side; there are green or brown smudges on 
passing noses. Our suspense is deep in regard 
to the color of paint in buckets into which 



HOUSE-CLEANING 19 

brushes are constantly dipped, for the matter 
is of great moment. Heaven grant that no 
mistaken blues, or sulphurous yellows, or un- 
holy magenta shades emerge to buffet our 
spirits during the coming year ! Kalsominers 
with their pallid pails go past in spotted white, 
like Pierrots suddenly awakened to a sense of 
the seriousness of life and its burdens. 

Everywhere is stir, motion, life, — it may 
be only the quick motion of feet escaping from 
the stream of warm water, which trickles by 
mistake down the front path; pulses go more 
rapidly, as fingers fly; wholesome excitement 
reigns. Through it all, one sees the satisfied 
faces of householders, as of those who have 
attained; and the wistful faces of domestic 
animals, astray in a world whose ideals are 
beyond their reach. 

It is not that we are unaware of modern 
devices, which keep this constant cleansing of 
the human habitation going on imperceptibly 
and do away with the necessity of the annual 
or semi-annual upheaval. We are aware of 
them, and we use them, but gingerly, and 



20 FAMILIAR WAYS 

with full knowledge of their limitations. The 
past has given us a standard which we refuse 
to forget as we face the new. Our mistrust 
is deepened by a belief that it is the most pov- 
erty-stricken in mind, spirit, and estate who 
are the staunchest upholders of the newest 
inventions. I shall not soon forget my brief 
visit to the junk-man's home, where I found 
"himself" and "herself" sitting at leisure in 
one of the two rooms of their cabin, surrounded 
by their entire possessions. All their bottles, 
dishes, cooking utensils stood about them on 
their unclean floor, amid random piles of dirt. 
Their faces wore an air of pleased expectancy; 
they were waiting, they said, for the vacuum 
cleaner. Vacuum cleaner, indeed ! Nothing 
but yellow soap and hot, hot water and sapolio 
could have made that room fit for human 
habitation. 

This memory is one of the many reasons 
why I pin a towel about my head and dust 
my beloved books myself, fingering them 
anxiously to see if aught in leaf or binding 
has come to harm. The word vacuum is 



HOUSE-CLEANING 21 

unthinkable in connection with any one of 
them, I sometimes think, as the opened page 
perhaps betrays me, and I sit down, in all the 
confusion, to joy and brief oblivion. 

There is dead monotony about these new 
housekeeping ways, each week the same pro- 
cess, mechanical, perfunctory. There is no 
rhythm of ebb and flow, no grand tidal wave 
of energy and feeling that seeks to accomplish 
the impossible, and succeeds in accomplish- 
ing the improbable. Where is gone that 
swelling aspiration of old days, that inner 
assurance that, were all made perfect once 
in order and cleanliness, no disorder could 
ever again prevail ? Some such mood of high 
spiritual adventure was surely Thoreau's when 
he wrote, — 

"The life in us is like the water in the river. 
It may rise this year higher than man has 
ever known it, and flood the parched uplands ; 
even this may be the eventful year that will 
drown out all our muskrats." 

Back of each of these old-fashioned house- 
hold earthquakes was some grand effort of 



22 FAMILIAR WAYS 

the human will, a resolution, a sense of great 
deeds to be performed. Ultimate and utter 
confusion evoked the energy of the human 
spirit, which rose successfully to meet it. 
Order came out of disorder, the splendid tri- 
umph of cosmos dawning on chaos, a far-off 
quiver of that magnificent, burning mood of 
the Creator, — "Let there be light!" Such 
a crisis is a test of your part in the final order. 
A world is in ruins at your feet : show what 
you can do. Mental collectedness, singleness 
of aim, steadiness of purpose, are imperative. 
The grand, artistic principle of choice, of selec- 
tion, must reign, — that principle which makes 
art, art, and literature, literature, the power 
of discerning the essential, — it is your test ! 
Box and chest are to be gone over, with that 
persistent problem of life and of philosophy 
before you, — what is to be discarded, what 
is to be kept? 

II 

Roused by a prophetic sense of the possible 
suffering of those who come after me, I bestir 



HOUSE-CLEANING 23 

myself. I must not leave all this miscellany, 
intellectual and other, — for there are boxes 
of old papers as well as trunks of clothing, — 
to my unfortunate heirs. Which bundles of 
silk or of serge, which rolls of muslin are to 
be kept, as perhaps serving some yet undis- 
covered purpose in the renewed life? Those 
left-over rolls of a beloved wall-paper which 
covered our living-room walls in past happy 
days, — how can I throw them away with- 
out throwing away something of that life 
which they recall.^ Which of the treasured, 
flawed, delicate dishes may still remain, not for 
use but for remembering, upon our shelves? 
Which are to go, as fragmentary as ourselves, 
into the ash-barrel, to await the test, the 
crucible, the resurrection in some form into 
a part of life again? 

There are garments well-nigh sacred, seem- 
ing not of mere cloth, garments which, more 
than most treasured things, have the power 
of poignantly stirring the memory, bringing 
the wearer before us, quick, alive in look and 
in gesture. One may give them away, but 



24 FAMILIAR WAYS 

with a struggle: old finely-tucked silken 
dresses of leaf-brown ill beseem the grandams 
of the slums; the quaint children's garments, 
preserved in the mysterious old green chest 
full of subtle fragrances, — secret place of 
hid treasures whose depths even house-clean- 
ing dared not disturb, — would be but scorned 
by the little aliens who yearn for the latest 
styles. 

One can decide the great things of life, 
after sufficient deliberation ; one has to ! 
There are destinies to face, grave reasons to 
be weighed for going or staying, for saying 
yes or no. The balance, in time, slowly and 
reasonably tips this way or that; but how 
shall one decide whether to keep or to burn 
the little treasures, — the half curl, the old 
picture, the package of letters tied by a cord 
which, in all probability, will never be undone ? 
And yet, to see them vanish in flakes of gray 
ash, so that they never could be read, would 
be hard. Here is the test of one's mettle, the 
measure of one's power of decision. 

What accidents, discoveries, what precious 



HOUSE-CLEANING 25 

bits of drift upon that flowing tide of spring 
time ! I too have come upon exceeding treas- 
ure, have come suddenly, and with holding 
of the breath. Never old wills, — such vul- 
gar happenings are relegated rightly to paper- 
covered fiction. As all real treasures are treas- 
ures of the spirit, one digs deep, deep in the 
hoard of the past for other values. A line, a 
sentence in familiar handwriting upon a yellow- 
ing scrap of paper may show a depth of soul 
undiscovered before in some one loved. I 
have known reconciliation to take place be- 
tween long-estranged friends when a forgotten 
flake of paper brought back an old mood of 
faith and trust. 

A single house-cleaning may bring your 
priest-like youth to minister to your relaxing 
middle age, in the rediscovery of some written 
witness to what you once were. Far, far 
along the dusty road, — it may be even meditat- 
ing retreat, — you meet your old self face to 
face, the morning sunlight on its forehead, in 
the freshness, vigor, hope of youth. The 
inspired, accusing eyes, the sense of being able 



26 FAMILIAR WAYS 

to do all, — from such an encounter you turn 
again, shamefaced, to the onward track, be- 
cause one, it may be sole survivor of that past, 
expects something of you. The old, impas- 
sioned resolve, brought back by a few written 
words, pierces your very breast. Husk by 
husk your later self is stripped away, and the 
real you, in all the simplicity of high intent, 
released from the mood of discouragement 
and failure, is ready to start again. 

Ill 

Again that wholesome sound of scrubbing, 
of running water, that chill atmosphere of 
fresh whitewash, something half way between 
the world of the living and that of the dead, 
recalling, by some trick of odor, the catacombs 
of Rome with their cool dampness, and, inevi- 
tably, their hint of new and fairer life, — the 
undying hope of immortality written in sym- 
bols there. 

Old memories associate this new freshness 
with the breath of delicate wild flowers 
abroad in the house, and lilies of the valley 



HOUSE-CLEANING 27 

whose fragrance stole long ago across chill 
May days of household lustration. This is 
the time of the quickening of all things, of 
casting off the old, of the building of the 
nests, and of all other sweet spring sights and 
sounds. We share this mood of spring in the 
joy of renewal ; here is the perpetual youth of 
the race ! 

I fancy that this spring house-cleaning 
has in it something of the potency of the con- 
fessional in the laying bare of old, sad secrets, 
and the ensuing sense of sudden lightness, — 
I speak only from imagination, for I have never 
been to the confessional; I sometimes wish 
I had ! — of having made a clean breast of it, 
of being even with life, of shaking off forever 
the dust of the past. 

Then, the peace of the after-moments, when 
all is sweet, clean, prepared ; Utopian moments, 
too perfect to last, — surely these are a fore- 
taste of perfectness to come, if the hopes of 
the highest-hearted among us are granted, full 
of new sense of the beauty of old things, with 
the ugly and outworn cast away. Earth's 



28 FAMILIAR WAYS 

utmost has been done, in the purifying fires 
and the cleansing that has searched all cor- 
ners, — as cleansing griefs have left the spirit 
prepared and ready. 



THE VEGETABLE SELF 

We have heard much about the repetition 
in the individual of the hfe of the race, and 
doubtless the least observant among us have 
noted confirmatory tokens, as, for instance, 
the tendency of the human young to walk 
on four legs, and those stages of urchin life 
which suggest only too vividly the actions of 
primitive man. It is strange that no one has 
had much to say about the fact that we reach 
further back, beyond our human selves, be- 
yond our vertebrate selves, even beyond the 
power of motion, to a primal fixedness. There 
are moments in my experience, and they mul- 
tiply as I grow older, when I am distinctly 
aware, through all the intricacies of being since 
that early dim existence, of my kinship with 
the first lichen clinging to the first rock. Wiser 
than I have talked of reminiscent intimations 

29 



30 FAMILIAR WAYS 

of immortality; to me come intimations of 
petal, stem, and root. There are certain moods 
for which our kinship with the animal world 
cannot account, leaf and bark moods, a feel- 
ing of identity with waving grass and with 
wind-tossed branches. Sometimes rain fall- 
ing on the face and hands brings sensations 
of which mere flesh and blood are incapable; 
those moments when you breathe through 
your fingers, and those when your whole heavy 
body becomes translucent in the sun demand 
explanation. You long, then, to slough off 
the vertebrae and skull, and spread yourself 
leaf-wise upon the air. This elusive yet poig- 
nant comprehension of phases of being in the 
vegetable world makes you say, as Whitman 
did of animals: *'Did I pass that way a long 
time ago?" 

Now that nature students have demonstrated 
that plants have eyes, and that they have 
consciousness — both facts which we ignorant 
folk could have told them long ago, but for the 
unaccountable habit of the wise never to take 
counsel of fools — I trust that some great 



THE VEGETABLE SELF 31 

scientist will add, with proofs, that plants 
have ears, for they have; and finger-tips, for 
they have; and manifold sensitiveness with 
which they are not usually credited. Nay, 
some may prove that they have souls, though, 
when you come to think of it, it has not been 
scientifically demonstrated that we have them 
ourselves. I remember many a call to the 
spirit through the world of green things. The 
ragged crests of the militant hemlocks in the 
West Woods, telling of centuries of struggle 
with wind and sleet, and the worn and twisted 
cedars clinging to rocks along the coast, wear 
the look that you now and then see upon an 
aged, "unsurrendered face ", recording an ex- 
perience that has not been all defeat. 

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of 
our kinship with the world of fixed and rooted 
life comes in our devotion to things. There is 
a terrible story by Balzac, Le Cur6 de Tours, 
written with that masterly realism whereby 
his records of human experience are bitten 
into our minds as with acid following the 
graving of an etcher's tool, the story of 



32 FAMILIAR WAYS 

the Abb6 Birotteau, who loved with consum- 
ing passion another's household possessions, 
and inherited them, only to lose them through 
trickery, losing with them health and all the 
joy of life. I doubt if any other writer has 
ever portrayed so vividly that fatal human 
clinging to objects which I believe is a sur- 
vival from our vegetable state. Balzac asserts 
that celibates — old maids, bachelors, priests 
— are most subject to this low form of human 
experience. So menacing is his power of pre- 
senting his ideas that I always believe him, 
whether I will or no, and I plead guilty, not 
only of belonging to one of the despised classes, 
but of possessing an inordinate love of objects, 
of which he speaks so scornfully, not of jewels, 
or of garments, but of certain places and cer- 
tain things which have grown all but human 
from their long association with human life. 

As I say this, I recall, from my earlier days, 
that southern doorway of my grandfather's 
old house, with the broad stone steps, and the 
gravelled path by which the single red roses 
bloomed in June, and I remember the clock 



THE VEGETABLE SELF 33 

with the green weeping willow picture upon 
its face and the straight-backed, rush-seated, 
chairs. The aged folk whose white heads I 
see against this background had grown one 
with their great maples for nearly ninety years, 
and I cannot separate them in my thought 
from the flowers that blossomed about their 
door. 

As these pictures come back in memory I 
realize that I, too, am growing fast daily to 
the spot in which I live, becoming part of my 
bit of earth. With our apple trees I have 
put down root for root, which will not come 
up without a wrench; the fibres of my being 
which have twisted about the mahogany 
settle and highboy will tear them and me if 
broken apart. I am anything but a clinging 
vine; temperament and profession forbid that, 
and yet, to the old-fashioned serving table, 
the windows toward the west, even to certain 
copper pots and pans, cling tendrils that 
put to shame woodbine fingers with their 
violent hold. The fine and fibrous roots that 
spread; the great lonely roots that take earth 



34 FAMILIAR WAYS 

into a deadly grip, and the hard, curling 
tentacles which grasp lintel and eaves so 
fatally that withdrawing them means death 
— I know them all. 

There are aspects of this phase of human 
life which are pleasant ; there are others which 
might well fill one with apprehension. The 
tendency to hold fast being inevitable, how 
shall one abide the fear of going away? I 
have been meaning to ask some learned bot- 
anist or florist if many plants share with certain 
ferns the tendency to wither and die if the pot 
containing them is but carried from one room 
to another. I, growing downward with un- 
numbered fibres of New England grass, shiver 
lest some rude wind of destiny may tear me 
up. With terror I hear the fiat that I must 
rend all ties and spend next year in Greece. 
If this come to pass, shall I be better than an 
uprooted vegetable? Can I send down roots 
among those cold, perfect stones? Even now, 
for brief spaces, in strange spots, I have a 
sense of withering, a baseless feeling, as of a 
plant cut sharply off. What if homesickness 



THE VEGETABLE SELF 35 

is, after all, but reminiscence, a dim, uncon- 
scious memory of roots ? 

Reflection opens up many a subject of in- 
quiry, on which Sir Thomas Browne might 
well have speculated. Are not our throes to 
discover a fixed and irrevocable theology or 
philosophy a harking back to that immobile 
time, an attempt to shirk the consequences of 
having come to life, a desire to return to a 
state of being from which relentless nature, 
now that we have once departed, sternly 
banishes us ? How many of us may be seen in 
the lichen state, cowering full length upon a 
stone; how many in the sea-anemone stage, 
feebly moving tentacles in endless circles, for- 
getting that our spiritual life is that of the 
quest, and that the great gift of motion was 
granted us that we might move — it may be, 
for, spite of unceasing efforts, the old hope has 
not been disproved — toward some great end. 

It is a curious question, too, why reminiscent 
hints of primitive animal life should come so 
early in the life of the individual, the tendency 
to return to vegetable ways so late. Indubi- 



36 FAMILIAR WAYS 

tably it is to the aged and the aging that it 
comes, and none could claim that it repre- 
sents the height of our achievement, being 
rather but a quiet descent. It is a kindly ex- 
perience, not like those violent emotions which 
rend and tear us in the heyday of our lives; 
gently accustoming us to the ways of earth, 
preparing us for the time when we shall feel, 
if not the daisies, at least the grass growing 
over us. 



A SABBATICAL YEAR 

I SOMETIMES wonder, in my leisure mo- 
ments — and they are all leisure moments 
now — how the story of the Garden would 
have run if it had been the other way about, — 
if our first parents, instead of being driven out 
of Eden, had been ordered in. Sitting here 
with my windows open to the sky of Greece; 
the Parthenon, beyond the flat roofs of the 
city, standing against the blue ; all the wonder 
and glory of the ancient world drifting dimly 
about the long ridge of Hymettus to the east, 
and the mountains of Argolis to the south, 
I fall to thinking, first of that far-away den 
where so many hours of my life have been 
ground out, with its grim desk of many pigeon- 
holes, its shelves of books, its severe ink-bottle, 
and its relentless pens, and then, unaccountably 
enough, I begin to think of Adam and Eve. 

37 



38 FAMILIAR WAYS 

Suppose they had been created of earth out- 
side the Garden; imagine them some evening 
sitting at the door of their wattled hut, tired 
of the long day's work at the wooden plough, 
— I doubt not that it would take both of them 
to manage it, as it does to-day on the uplands 
of Greece. One can see the tired donkey 
browsing on the slightly browned grass, the 
sheep and goats lying about under the guar- 
dianship of the dog, the chickens slowly find- 
ing their way to their roost in the olive tree, 
the red rim of sunset in the west, and Adam 
taking a draught of water, rare and precious 
in this dry land, out of one of those gourd- 
shaped jars that antedate recorded history. 
One can hear Eve — the kerchief that has 
protected her head from the burning sun all 
day folded about baby Cain to keep out the 
evening damp — one can hear tired Eve croon- 
ing her first-born to sleep, and then — 

Suppose that an angel, beautiful and blind- 
ing, had swept toward earth's first poor home, 
frightening the sheep and the donkey, who 
would take to their heels over dry acanthus and 



A SABBATICAL YEAR 39 

withered grass, scaring the chickens until they 
fluttered squawking from the oKve tree, waking 
baby Cain to his first roar of defiance against 
divine command, — suppose that this terrible 
angel, I say, instead of barring them from 
Paradise, had commanded them to go in. 

One can almost share the anxious hours of 
planning in the dark, the wonderment about 
what to take, Adam's uncertainty as to the 
need of his sheep-skin coat. Eve's decision 
against her distaff, the whole bewildered de- 
bating that attends any packing, that would 
attend most of all this august preparation for 
Paradise. One can imagine the broken sleep, 
those glory-haunted dreams that verge on 
nightmare, and that waking, in the clear golden 
dawn, to grief at parting with dog and donkey, 
and to fear that wolf and jackal would spoil 
the little herd. One can follow that slow jour- 
ney eastward to the flaming gate, eyes shaded 
by the hand to make its glory bearable, eyes 
shaded by the hand to catch the last glimpse 
of the hut that was home. 

And then — but I have no way of picturing 



40 FAMILIAR WAYS 

the splendor of Paradise; have I ever been 
there? Certain long-past moments of vivid 
life might perhaps give a suggestion of the awe 
and wonder it would rouse : that first glimpse 
of Italy, for instance, years and years ago, 
with southern sunshine on brown hill and cy- 
press, or the glory of white Alps at sunrise. 
Dimly one can realize the awful joy of those 
first moments, broken suddenly by a grating 
sound as the angel shuts the gate. 

And then, the greenness, the witchery of 
strange paths, the glamour of it all. Set with 
trees of all kinds, its loveliness was assured; 
cedars of Lebanon, tall fronded palms, cy- 
presses; and surely writ, if not holy writ, 
assures us that the silver birch is there : 

" And by the gates of Paradise 
The birk grew fair eneugh." 

That, of course, may mean inside, and 
should ; no tree is fitter. One can imagine — 
inadequately of course, if one could imagine 
anything adequately it would not be imagining, 
— the innumerable, many-colored, feathered 



A SABBATICAL YEAR 41 

things among the bewildering branches, and 
the dehght in watching their strange manoeu- 
vres. One can share Eve's surprise and de- 
hght in finding httle Cain no longer heavy to 
carry, for one is not allowed to imagine bur- 
dens in Eden. Stream by stream they would 
wander, exploring the four rivers ; tree by tree 
would lead them on; and many an innocent 
fruit, even unforbidden apple, would they test, 
Cain doubtless struggling vainly for his share. 
One can dimly see the undiscovered flowers, 
tall, white lilies, saffron roses, and a million 
many-tinted, fragrant things. One can be 
glad for that lightness of the heart in relief 
from old troubles, the sense of the illimitable 
riches of idleness, the joy of endless sunshine 
and endless leisure. 

And yet it is easy to see how, after a little, 
the hands of these two honest toilers would 
begin, unconsciously, to reach out toward the 
old plough handle, drawing quickly back in 
shame; how Eve would begin to worry about 
the lightness of Cain upon her back, longing 
for the pressure of the old sweet burden. One 



42 FAMILIAR WAYS 

can understand the sidelong glances with 
which their eyes would wander past the bird 
of paradise, in search of those familiar feath- 
ered things of home. After all, could one 
spend eternity at the Zoo? With the ''honey- 
dew" of Paradise on their lips they would 
think wistfully of the humble noon-day meal 
of old days, taken as they sat cross-legged 
under the olive trees. With their first mis- 
givings how they would begin to entertain each 
other ! How they would point out effects of 
line and of color ! One can hear their increas- 
ing assurances to each other of how delight- 
ful it all was; but, in the silences, all the old 
hard things would come trooping back in 
memory : the death of their first donkey, the 
hunger, of that first year of tilling the soil, 
before the crops were ripe, and remembered 
anguish would be twice as hard to bear as any 
day's brave facing of present hardships. So, 
shade by shade, one becomes aware of the 
misery of their splendid loneliness as they sit 
under alien palms, their anguish of heart when 
the day's sight-seeing is over, and evening 



A SABBATICAL YEAR 43 

comes, the time for the folding of the sheep. 
How Eve would long to set to rights the wattled 
hut, but oh, the goats might already have 
eaten the wattled hut ! Alas, for the pointless- 
ness of Paradise : no spot more sacred than 
another, in all this magnificent expanse, no 
centre called home. Where is the old pre- 
ciousness of water, with water everywhere? 
Where the sense of the divine right of well- 
earned rest ? For some reason the story seems 
far sadder than that of the expulsion from the 
Garden. One has not the heart to follow 
these poor exiles in Eden, doomed to endless 
holiday, through more than one day; how 
then shall one endure a year, a Sabbatical year ? 
But I must stop lest I blaspheme ; and see, the 
sun is going down in golden glory behind the 
Parthenon, with promise of a fine day for sight- 
seeing to-morrow. It is not for one of stern 
Presbyterian descent to minimize the primal 
curse of toil. 



IT IS WELL TO BE OFF WITH THE 
OLD HOUSE BEFORE YOU ARE ON 
WITH THE NEW 

If the little old house had been more gracious 
when we came back to it from our months 
of wandering, this never would have happened. 
Perhaps it could not forgive us for going away. 
It would have nothing to do with us, was 
sulky, remote, inaccessible, a little house of 
frowning blinds and closed doors. When spring 
came, and the apple trees about it put forth 
no green leaves, we realized, startled, that 
they had died. Had they perhaps missed 
us even more than we missed them? The 
neighbors hinted San Jos 6 scale; we repudi- 
ated the suggestion with scorn. In all our 
coming and going, unpacking, settling, visiting 
old corners, the house feigned a lofty indiffer- 
ence, and would have sat down cat-wise if 
it could, with its back turned toward us, its 

44 



THE OLD HOUSE AND THE NEW 45 

tail curled rigidly round. We hoped that 
this was only a mood, but it proved lasting. 
When we spoke it would not listen; when 
we listened it would not speak, as of old; it 
would yield up no shade of its experience for 
us when we were puzzled, no ray of comfort 
when we were sad. Its inexorable coldness 
lasted so long that at last it drove us out, 
wondering that this ever could have seemed 
home, to seek a spot where we could build a 
house of our very own. 

When, after long search, we had found it, 
and had shamefacedly concealed the secret 
for days in our hearts, hoping that the little 
house would not understand, it suddenly 
began again to exercise its old charm. It 
became irresistible, smiling on us under April 
showers, inviting to soft, homelike corners, 
summoning blue-bird and robin to sing to us. 
The rain on the roof brought a sense of loss; 
we should never again be so near the roof ! 
Rooms that had seemed too small and cramped 
suddenly became spacious and beautiful, yet 
we resolutely followed our stern purpose. 



46 FAMILIAR WAYS 

Perhaps if our plot of land had been less 
difficult to win, we should not have pursued 
it with such zest. This was a minx of a bit 
of real estate, full of shifts and wiles, of swift 
advance and swifter withdrawals. It lay at 
the end of the village, where all beyond was 
meadow; we had wished it so. Groups of 
white birches gave it a delicate beauty, and 
made it seem the very edge of created things. 
Perhaps it was the breezes in those shivering 
birch-leaves that brought to us a sense of quest. 
Ultimate possession seemed as impossible as 
ultimate possession of the ideal, or of the human 
heart. Such an appealing, evasive bit of land 
never before existed, and Alexander in the 
history, Tamerlane in the play, got the earth 
more easily than we got this fifteen-thousand- 
square-foot plot of ground. For all its 
demure look it had wiles within wiles, toils 
within toils, for the confusion of human- 
kind. 

In the first place, its owner was in heaven; 
how could we read our title clear on earth 
without his signature? In the second place. 



THE OLD HOUSE AND THE NEW 47 

some of the heirs were in the Philippines. 
Sometimes the httle house seemed to chuckle 
softly to itself in the twilight as we recounted 
our difficulties, involving minor children, three 
unsettled estates, and lapsed guardianship 
coming from another death. The executor 
wished to sell ; we wished to buy, but the tangle 
of the law was about us in tight meshes, and 
we were in a state of paralysis where, it if was 
sad to reflect what man has made of man, 
it was sadder to reflect what man has made 
of real estate. The little house developed 
into a gleeful and impish thing, entering gayly 
into the plot against us. Did we not miss 
the lawyer's call because the bell refused to 
ring.^ Did it not swallow up somewhere in 
its plentiful cracks and crevices the letter with 
the foreign postmark that might have ended 
our difficulties sooner .^^ It wore in those days 
of uncertainty a look of amused skepticism, as 
of lifted eyebrows, about those upper windows 
with their rounded frames. 

Between coaxing wiles, bewitching as a 
kitten's, and threats about our state of mind 



48 FAMILIAR WAYS 

if we should go away, it nearly won us back, 
recalling all those moments of insight, vision, 
dream, inevitably connected with itself, until 
it seemed as if the rare flashes of light on things 
could come only under this roof. The frost- 
bitten window-panes, the deep snow outside, 
the icicles at the corner of the dormer window, 

" When Dick the shepherd blows his nail ; '* 

those later days of open windows, with mur- 
muring life in the air, the rose-touched apple- 
blossoms drifting across the threshold, — where 
should we find them again ? It had a thousand 
ways of intimating that, though we might 
build a house larger, more airy, with wide 
porches, we should never build one that would 
be, like this, the very heart of home. Have you 
not found, the little house kept asking, in all 
your traveling by land and by sea, that that 
which you seek cannot be overtaken by swift 
footsteps? For true content, the lagging feet, 
the nimble soul. Here had come the sense 
that comes, perhaps, in but one spot in the 
wide universe, too delicate, too evanescent to 



THE OLD HOUSE AND THE NEW 49 

be repeated, the subtle, indefinable sense of 
long-abiding. 

To each of us, once in a lifetime, is granted 
a nook or a cranny where he may stand with 
back against the wall, facing the eternities 
and the immensities. It is a refuge from wide, 
empty, endless space, and from the threatened 
golden streets of heaven. It' is consolation 
for the eternal shifting and changing of this 
inexplicable, swift, windy world, bringing — 
is it but a dream ? — a sense of something fixed, 
enduring, permanent. 

The little house said as much in its more 
eloquent moments, but it was our turn to be 
cold and haughty, and to turn an alien face. 
When our uncertainties as to title were over, 
and our plans went on apace, it sat and lis- 
tened while we talked of what our new home 
should have, garden, pergola, enchanting gables, 
but it said never a word. Yet there grew up 
in us from its dumb reproach a sense of the 
limitations of the new one. It would be 
ignorant of the basic facts of life, with no experi- 
ences, no traditions. Birth and death were 



50 FAMILIAR WAYS 

secrets to it; it would be blind in the face of 
the morning sun, and of the evening star, 
with so much to learn, so much to learn ! 
We, in the old one, had been comforted by its 
age, consoled by its brave way of holding out; 
had found it faithful as companionship grew 
rare, and death and distance robbed us of 
our own. This would have none of the gentle- 
ness of judgment that comes from having loved 
and suffered. We must start a tradition, and 
live up to it, must keep it unspotted, must 
share forever here the fierce, crude, white 
idealism of youth. Constantly with us, as 
we carried on the sad packing of our earthly 
all, was the sense that we had had, before 
finding this little hired house, of wandering 
through endless space in enduring homeless- 
ness. 

There had been something fine and free 
in our relationship; did we like to stay just 
because we could go if we chose? Perhaps 
the heavy deed which legalized our possession 
of that other spot would destroy all delight, 
in its substitution of external hold for that 



THE OLD HOUSE AND THE NEW 51 

which endures only while affection lasts. "Until 
death us do part ", has a solemn sound, and, as 
we signed the last check completing our owner- 
ship, we knew that this was our ultimate 
venture. 

The time came when we drove away with 
the last of our possessions, leaving the little 
house alone, gray in the gray twilight, as 
it had often before been abandoned, through 
death or perfidy, faithful still to its old trust 
of harboring human life. I thought of Theseus, 
and of Ariadne left lonely on the shore of 
Naxos ; of Jason and Medea, — and here I 
hastily peered into the hamper containing the 
two cats, sole children of our home, — ven- 
geance must not light on them ! — of ^Eneas, 
who also went on his way to found a new house ; 
and of Dido, — oh, I hoped this would not 
burn ! 

As we drove under the shadowy elms of 
the village street toward our new, untried 
threshold, I realized that I had nothing left 
to learn about the deserters of all time. 



REAL ESTATE 



Several years ago I was told of two clergy- 
men, acquaintances of mine, who had just 
given up their chosen calling to go into real 
estate business. The fact lingered long in my 
mind, with a certain discomfort, making me 
scan past and future with dim misgivings. 
Real estate versus the realm of the spirit — 
I did not like the antithesis. So they had 
forsaken the Heavenly City for Long Island, 
the exposition of the charm of golden streets 
for the new boulevard! But is the Penn- 
sylvania Railroad, I asked indignantly, any 
true substitute for the narrow way? For a 
time I felt bankrupt, as one does when some 
great crisis has caused panic, subverted values, 
made worthless the priceless securities of yes- 

52 



REAL ESTATE 53 

terday. My inheritance seemed to depreciate 
rapidly, for my ancestors had staked their all 
upon that invisible reality which is now being 
quoted lower and lower in the markets of the 
world. Did they, I asked myself, who turned 
their faces heavenward with so rich a sense of 
possession, after all die intestate? From the 
innermost corner of my soul came the echoed 
answer, "No!" and again I hugged my old 
cloak of dreams about me, resolving that, 
whatever befell, I would never join the rank of 
those who could misinterpret the word "real" 
as meaning mere things. 

That was three years ago. Now, alas ! I 
have fallen from my high estate of the invisi- 
ble. I, too, have come to traffic in so-called 
"real estate", not with a view of providing 
other people with homes, but to providing 
myself. I have deserted my sky-chamber, 
and have purchased a small piece of ground. 
No longer have I the right to scorn those 
who mistake finite things for reality. The 
earth has laid hold upon me. I understand 
now the greed wherewith men have clutched 



54 FAMILIAR WAYS 

and held it, from earliest savage days to the 
Oklahoma scandals of land-grabbing. The 
curse of property has descended upon me; 
the selfishness of the landed gentry which I 
have so scorned as I have driven past high 
English walls, set with jagged glass, is no longer 
unintelligible to me. My pleasure in touch- 
ing my small bit of land betrays me akin to 
those I have censured. I could put an Eng- 
lish county into my pocket ! Remembering 
the vast acres of Sherwood Forest, at present 
ironically embodied in the "dukeries", I won- 
der whether I should now, as always of yore, 
be on Robin Hood's side. There is strange 
delight in standing upon your own plot of 
ground; I color with displeasure when an un- 
friendly foot is put upon it. In moments of 
compunction I realize how fully it possesses 
me, instead of my possessing it, and I become, 
for a mood or so, converted to the doctrines of 
Henry George, not because ownership of land 
is unfair to other men, but because it is un- 
fair to one's self. I grow limited, selfish. One 
not good at bargains might as readily change 



REAL ESTATE 55 

his inner self for a hundred and twenty foot lot 
as for the whole world, perhaps. 

Real estate ! There is the house and all the 
to-do of building it. For months my soul 
has gone howling in a wilderness of things. 
It has been as if, for an awful season, the world 
of the materialists had come true, and there 
existed only a universe of objects, hard, tangi- 
ble, impenetrable. Even the sense that my 
own fierce resentment disproves such a theory, 
that I could not so rebel if there existed noth- 
ing but length and breadth and height, does not 
do away with a dismayed feeling that it is so. 
My universe is bounded by a long tape-meas- 
ure; my mind is a mere wood-pile, a brick 
heap, a collection of paint-pots. I used to 
think that within me dwelt an immortal spirit 
— they taught me this when I was young; 
nothing dwells there now save bath-tubs and 
fire-places and dormer-windows. A quick, 
electric flash of thought used sometimes to 
thrill through me; now, idea meets idea as 
wood knocks on wood, and my thoughts jangle 
one on another like our new hardware. I am 



56 FAMILIAR WAYS 

oppressed by fears of flood and fire, and of 
thieves that may break in and steal. I, who 
worry about the silver, never used to worry 
lest some one had stolen my aspirations. My 
hopes were burglar-proof; my thoughts where 
moth and rust do not corrupt. Busy all my 
life with airy nothingnesses, from the point of 
view of the real estate agent, with the eternal 
verities, from my own point of view, I count 
over my increasing material possessions with 
an increasing sense of loss. We are insured 
from injury by fire, but who can insure the 
middle-aged from the loss of their ideals? 

II 

For it is not only my anxieties but my 
content that alarms me. There are moments 
when I look at this little white house, child of 
so many sleepless nights and haggard days, 
with a feeling that desire could go no farther. 
It fills up the measure of my affection; it is 
just as high as my heart. If, following the sug- 
gestion of Queen Mary, you should open this 
organ, you would find engraved there not 



REAL ESTATE 57 

"Calais", but "pergola." I might add that a 
short grass path leads to it from the butler's 
pantry door, and that we mean to dine there 
on spring evenings, while the hylas call from 
the brookside below, and on late autumn after- 
noons, while crickets chirp near by. At times 
I struggle with a sudden sense of limitation; 
my soul used to be more than thirty-eight by 
thirty-two ! I would rather have it back. I 
was not in the old days walled about and 
roofed in. Now I have but windows and a 
skylight through which I can see, faint and 
far, a few of the stars that used to seem so near 
above my wandering head. 

But, more than in the house, in yard and 
garden I batten on a low content. As I work, 
upon my knees — a posture that once, alas ! 
served other ends — my hands touching the 
cool, crumbling clods, I can feel all my inner 
self creeping down in roots and fibres, changing 
into those small seed grains and bulbs that will 
quicken into the misty blue of the delphiniums, 
the pale gold of the iris. The curving gray 
walk shuts off all glimpse of the far trails on the 



58 FAMILIAR WAYS 

heavenly hills; the ripple of the birch leaves, 
the hum of the bees, keep all more distant music 
from my ears; the oriole wins me from desire 
to hear the angels sing; subtle, penetrating 
fragrances from fern and grass and clove pinks 
close the door to that inmost me where thought 
and aspiration used sometimes to enter hand 
in hand. Now come only dim wonderings, as 
I watch the sunlight, golden-green through 
grape-vine leaves : has the soul color ? Will 
anything beyond make good the loss of the 
touch on cheek and nostril of the deep-red 
rose that bends above my work? Earth to 
earth — will going back to the great all-mother 
be a wholly pleasant feeling, like this? 

From such moods I waken with a start, 
tugging at my chain of sense, conscious of a 
lost domain. Where are my old sympathies, 
and the remembered wrongs that were not 
mine? At moments I cease to mourn, among 
these fragrances, for St. Bartholomew and the 
burning of the Slocum, for the hurt of suffering 
children and maimed animals. In this insidious 
content I lose myself and the only real me, that 



REAL ESTATE 59 

desire to know all and share all, which is the 
seed of immortality. I rise in quick resolve. 
Grass shall no longer grow through the inner 
part of me. I will not barter my kingdom of 
the air for a mess of dirt, however full at times 
of that wet fragrance that takes me back to 
my earth-worm days. It is dragging me down, 
this bit of earth, to what I was before my soul 
was born, when yet I wriggled through moist, 
reedy things, in the grateful coolness of mud. 
The grain of dust wherewith one starts, the 
six feet one needs at the last, are all the real 
estate that one may claim. I will arise and 
sell my plot of ground, and put the gold- 
pieces in my pocket, for mine and others' use. 
The endless road for me ! 



OUR NEAREST, — AND FARTHEST, 
NEIGHBORS 



Our nearest neighbors stand a bit aloof, and 
do not visit us except for the briefest stay. 
Newcomers, we are somewhat hurt; peering 
out of the corners of our windows we watch 
and wait, as silent, as motionless as they 
when they watch us, and still they pass us by. 
It is true that we have forced our way into an 
old community, and have broken soil among 
the undisturbed trees on a green hillside still 
clothed in the primeval grass of the wilderness. 
Those earlier settlers, the meadow-larks, have 
perhaps a right to complain of our intrusion. 
Complain they do, their notes of gentle protest 
coming early in the spring, and sounding on 
through warm summer days to autumn. What 
has gone wrong with their housekeeping, I 

60 



OUR NEIGHBORS 61 

wonder, that they so persistently lament? 
Certainly we have not disturbed the homes of 
their building, and are ready to go more than 
half way in making friends. 

As I see, though pretending not to look, 
the bright, untrusting eyes that watch us from 
adjacent trees, as I hear swift wings beating 
retreat, I marvel that they do such scanty 
justice to our good intent. Is it because of 
our coming that the mourning dove so mourns ? 
Do they not like our way of housekeeping? 
It is as careful, as methodical, as industrious 
as their own. It is, moreover, as old-fashioned, 
for we like ancestral ways, and are averse to 
the new-fangled devices of the ladies' journals, 
— oh, horror of pink teas and lavender lunch- 
eons ! And we share their woodland tastes : 
one doorway opens on a hillside with a wood 
beyond, the other upon what the English would 
call a copse. 

It cannot be our clothes that they object to, 
for our modest greens and browns are as un- 
obtrusive as the wear of any bird or squirrel 
of them all. Indeed, I should not think of 



62 FAMILIAR WAYS 

going abroad in the colors that certain of them 
wear, — scarlet, or vivid blue, or brilliant 
orange, — for even Solomon in all his glory 
was not arrayed like some of these. Perhaps 
they do not like the company we keep, yet 
our one meek gray cat who strolls with us in 
the evening coolness on hillside or by garden 
path would not hurt them; only, at sight of 
them, an impotent lashing of the tail and a 
faint, queer snarl recall his far-off savage an- 
cestry. It seems perfectly automatic and 
unconscious, and is certainly incongruous in 
the presence of the Christian virtues which 
that cat has acquired from us. He is not 
proud and unfriendly, but is willing to go as 
far as his four paws can carry him across that 
space which separates even the friendliest 
beasts from their distant human kin. 

n 

We have courted our new neighbors with 
crumbs in winter-time ; we have courted them 
in April with string laid out enticingly on the 
grass, as the starting-point of home; we have 



OUR NEIGHBORS 63 

tied suet to the trees in snowy weather, and 
have maintained luncheon counters of nuts 
and of wheat ; we have, quite in the prevailing 
fashion in social service, established a public 
bath. All these favors they have accepted, 
with mental reservations, on tip-toe for flight, 
a- wing at first sight of us. We have even 
established model tenements ; well-lighted, well- 
ventilated residences are offered rent free. 
Some of them were fashioned of cigar-boxes, 
some of grape-baskets; all were covered with 
birch-bark to match the trees on which they 
hang. Yet the blue-birds pass by the homes 
intended especially for them, and the wren- 
house, made with the exact size of doorway 
that the bird book prescribed for the least of 
sweet singers of Christendom, has never lured 
the longed-for tenant to our eaves. 

To that cold table, winter-set, come jays 
and juncoes and chickadees. I find on the 
porch-roof in the new-fallen snow innumerable 
little footprints of the latter, or see in the morn- 
ing sunshine a whole white and gray flock 
feeding like one, flying away like one, if I go 



64 FAMILIAR WAYS 

too near. I am always expecting the nuthatch, 
who feasts royally for one of his size, with a 
kind of Christmas gusto; but he has never 
accepted his invitation. When the sky is 
heavy with snow about to fall, I think often 
that perhaps he will come to-morrow, for, 
with the inhabitants of air as with the inhab- 
itants of earth, necessity increases friendliness. 

Regarding these, and our few other winter 
birds, meadow-larks, kinglets, brown creepers, 
I often wonder in what corners they cuddle, 
and whether snow, rightly used, makes a warm 
blanket. A yearning sense of hospitality in 
the stinging cold weather, a desire to share 
the warmth of the hearth with wee things shut 
outside, human or other, pauses here at the 
bounds that nature has set. That which one 
has to offer is not that which is needed; this 
puzzled wish to help is touched by the chill of 
philanthropy, and baffled by the lack of under- 
standing that must exist between those who 
share no common threshold. 

As for our most constant winter guest, the 
jay, I cannot accept the common scorn of him. 



OUR NEIGHBORS 65 

often shown by critics in reality no more gener- 
ous than he. Wherein eating other birds' eggs 
differs from the methods commonly employed 
by the fittest in surviving, I have yet to see, 
and I watch him with the remote wonder 
wherewith, at a distance, I watch our preda- 
tory merchant-princes masquerading in the 
brilliant plumage of philanthropists. The jays 
have dash, presence; they lack scruple, and, 
with the loud platform manners, — for they 
seem always, through their shrill cries, to be 
addressing an audience, — they are curiously 
akin to others successful in business and in 
public life. I am told that the jay behaves 
better at home than when he is away, and I 
respect him for that he reverses the practice 
of many, and forgive him for his noise in my 
yard, knowing that he is silent in his own door- 
way. I could forgive him much, too, for the 
beauty of his outstretched wings against the 
world of winter white and the white birch 
trunks. Often, on the coldest days, his tap- 
tapping at the hard suet wakens me; from 
porch railing or branch of tree he watches me, 



66 FAMILIAR WAYS 

his head cocked on one side, with a judicious 
and critical expression, and I feel, as I watch 
him in return, that no creature more mentally 
alert crosses our domain on feathers or on feet. 
Yet he lacks something — shall I call it imagi- 
native vision ? — that impels other birds to 
seek far shores and new horizons, in unceasing 
quest. 

Ill 

A family of wee field sparrows have a door- 
way very near our own, snuggling down under 
a shaggy thatch of brown grass like English 
cottagers. Most neighborly, of course, are 
the robins; and on July mornings troops of 
spotted-breasted birdlings cross our lawn, each 
headed by that model father red-breast, who, 
as I am told, takes charge of the early brood 
while the mother-bird is hatching out the 
second, roosts with them by night among the 
trees, and by day teaches them the lore of 
robin life. The small, low branches of the 
birch trees are evidently excellent for the robin 
kindergarten held here, and I can bear witness 



OUR NEIGHBORS 67 

to the thoroughness of the pedagogical methods, 
if any aerial agency requires testimonials. 
Flying lessons, swimming lessons, foraging 
lessons go on incessantly, and all day long 
they search for worms. Once, when I thought 
of adopting a young robin that had fallen out 
of the nest, a scientist told me that it would 
require twelve feet of worms in twelve hours, 
and I desisted. It is fortunate that my own 
students have no such appetites ! The young 
things trail solemnly around after their parent, 
two or three at a time, like chickens; if his 
head turns but for an instant, beaks fly wide 
open, as if moved by springs. It is a pretty 
sight to see the deftness wherewith he drops in 
a worm, the young one squatting on the grass, 
or waiting on a twig, and swallowing the 
booty before the old bird has even ceased 
flying. The kindergarten has always seemed 
to me questionable in rendering the child too 
passive, and I have my doubts about this. 
Surely these fat babies could bestir themselves 
a little sooner ! Though a ''mere picker up of 
learning's crumbs ", with only intellectual rela- 



68 FAMILIAR WAYS 

tions with the young, I cannot help being ab- 
surdly pleased when I see these birdlings begin 
to find bits for themselves. 

In the flying lessons more independence is 
insisted upon from the first, and the notes 
wherewith the nestlings are urged from branch 
to empty air are sharp, incisive, and full of 
anxiety. More coaxing tones lure them to the 
bird bath in the shallow terra-cotta basin on the 
lawn, and here they are shown how to dip and 
spatter the water with fluttering wings, and 
how to dry their feathers afterward. I saw 
an old bird teaching three at a time one day, 
and then shooing them out one by one when the 
bath was over. Later, one of the young ones 
went back, once, twice, three times, and stood 
shivering on the brink, afraid to plunge, for all 
the world like a ridiculous baby. 

These marvelously competent creatures 
converse with their young with a wide range 
of notes, and ward off from them the very 
appearance of danger, valiantly fighting away 
the jays, and ordering me to take in the cat 
if he put but the tip of his gray nose outside 



OUR NEIGHBORS 69 

the door. Expert parents, entirely taken up 
with the diet and the physical education of 
their progeny, they seem, more than most 
birds, to belong to our era, and I think of them 
as better able to cope with the ideals of our 
present civilization than are many of our song- 
sters. Their cheerful, bustling materialism, 
their content in unflagging search for the neces- 
sary worm, strike one as distinctly contem- 
porary. Like the jays in their alert practicality, 
they fail like them in that charm of elusiveness 
and mystery that we associate with winged 
things, yet they have that fundamental idealism 
that dares all and enlists all in the defence of 
home. The year after the great war began a 
blue-jay attacked a robin's nest in a near-by 
maple tree; the robins, aided by other robins, 
fought fiercely, and at length the jay took 
refuge in our birches. Here the defenders 
were joined by a pair of cat-birds, two orioles, 
and a pair of red- winged blackbirds. Together 
the allies drove away the marauder, — a pro- 
phetic battle, we trust. 



70 FAMILIAR WAYS 

IV 

Watching and waiting, we get glimpses of 
the many-sided neighborhood life about us, 
even of creatures more exclusive than robins. 
The oldest inhabitants, the crows, are always 
with us, slowly moving on black wings against 
gray clouds of winter, or congregating among 
sunlit pine branches in July. At the first 
touch of warmer sun, the first deeper blue in 
the February sky, they are astir; what sig- 
nificance has this busy and systematic flying, 
with loud caws, back and forth along the line 
of trees that border the stream .^^ What do 
they discuss, what plans do they make, when 
they gather in vast numbers in the tree tops ? 
Although distant, I half overhear debates that 
sound far more interesting and important than 
those which it is my duty to attend; opinions 
are uttered with more conviction, an energy of 
rough speech that will not be denied. The 
assembly would seem to be appointing com- 
mittees to act with power, then suddenly to 
resolve itself, with outstretched wings, into a 
committee of the whole. 



OUR NEIGHBORS 71 

I have always had a special admiration 
for these neighbors who watch, with apparent 
disdain, generations of mere human life, and a 
special curiosity in regard to what they know. 
Harsh oracles of primeval speech issue from 
their throats as we draw near, but they will 
not admit us to their councils ; and the way 
in which they watch our approach, slowly 
make up their minds in our disfavor, and fly 
deliberately away, is more insulting than sud- 
den terror. I am told that their success in 
life is largely due to the cooperative, highly 
organized thieving, as yet undisturbed by any 
anti-trust law, and that the social instinct is in 
them very fully developed. What care I how 
social they be, if they are so unsociable with 
me? Some of the subtleties of their deep 
knowledge have been made known, but more 
are as yet unfathomed. Timeless, they dwell 
in immemorial mystery, and have solemn asso- 
ciations with long-forgotten sunrises and sun- 
sets. A sombre significance clings to them, 
different from that attaching to any other 
feathered things, sombre but not malign. Yet 



72 FAMILIAR WAYS 

when, a day or two ago, a huge crow flew so 
close to the window where I was watching that 
I could have touched him, for a pagan moment 
I shrank, for he was as a mythological creature 
out of an elder world, and I seemed to see my 
doom descending on black, slow-beating wings. 
For the most part, however, though these 
neighbors stand aloof and hold me in deserved 
contempt, I count them friends, and find little 
in the world more expressive than they, flapping 
their way over distant fields and cawing I know 
not what ancient wisdom. A single crow in the 
gathering twilight, flying toward the darkening 
wood, has a look of going straight to the central 
mystery of things, and in him I seem to see 

" The last bird fly into the last light." 

Nearer our human comprehension are the 
red-winged blackbirds, in whom we take great 
delight, with their fascinating housekeeping 
among the long swamp-grasses and reeds, 
through which a many-branched stream threads 
its wet way. Blue flag flowers grow here, 
tall cat-tails and rushes ; something — perhaps 



OUR NEIGHBORS 73 

the way of the stream with the grasses, the 
moist fragrance of it all, the gurgle of the water 
among the lily-pads, or the meeting of the slop- 
ing meadow beyond with the wood — brings 
an encompassing sense of shelter, of comfort, 
and of home. The blackbirds come early, 
with the first faint green in the hidden hollows 
of the surrounding hills; they call over bare, 
brown meadows where only close-watching eyes 
could see spring. As the marsh begins to turn 
green, and roots quicken, they build and sing, 
making their nests by the water-side, many 
near together in pleasant comradeship; more 
and more protected as the grasses grow tall 
and create, with their feathery green heads and 
deeper green of the blades, an exquisite shelter 
of delicate shades and gradations. 

These builders in the shadow and the sun 
have a poetry of note and of motion that the 
robins lack; whistling, chuckling softly, they 
sink, with what loveliness of flight ! low, low 
to their nests in the reeds. The protective- 
ness of the parent wings, the little answering 
peep from the nest, are as something remem- 



74 FAMILIAR WAYS 

bered from lullaby times of long ago. Not 
because of any overtures from them, for they 
fly swiftly, with menacing wings, toward us if 
we venture too near, writing "thus far and no 
farther" upon the twilight air, we count them 
among our most prized companions, and again 
and again go reluctantly from these red-and- 
black-clad neighbors who do not call, to put 
on polite attire and walk sedately down the 
village street, making belated visits to those 
justly irate human neighbors, who called so 
long ago ! Near of kin these winged things 
seem, though separated far in the world of 
physical being, in their jealous guarding of the 
threshold, their deep sense of the inviolability 
of home. Through the last days of wind and 
snow we watch and wait for them, and each 
succeeding summer the greater is our loneliness 
when they are gone and there are no more 
brave wings with touches of red against the 
sky above the sunken meadow. Something 
of the sense of loss of vanished human com- 
panionship attends our autumn walks near 
these "fledged birds' nests" whence the birds 



OUR NEIGHBORS 75 

have flown ; alas for these old friends, and 
the white stretches of winter silence that they 
leave behind them ! 

V 

It is with me in regard to birds as in regard 
to people: I have no desire to know all, nor 
do I wish to catalogue the entire species, but I 
sorely covet friendly intimacy with a few. In 
both cases I have a pleasant acquaintance 
with some whose names I do not know. With 
the flicker that I find clinging to my screen in 
the morning, — having heard his knocking at 
my window, dimly, through waking and dreams, 
— in all the brave beauty of his brown-spotted, 
creamy breast and his red crown, I would fain 
have further intercourse, but his quick wings 
will not so. I could "desire of more acquaint- 
ance", too, with the evening .grosbeak, who, 
despite his name, called at nine o'clock one 
stormy March morning, then flew away for- 
ever. 

I want to know, but never shall, the little 
screech owl, whose cry, most significant and 



76 FAMILIAR WAYS 

characteristic, shrill, sweet, and weird, sounds 
out from the near-by wood and now and then 
from our own trees. I hold my breath when, 
lying in bed, I hear him, and, even in the dark, 
I see him clearly, yet not him. Long, long ago 
a kind friend caught one and gave him to me; 
tame him I could not; he only stared at me 
with big, unseeing eyes, and refused to swallow 
the food placed in his beak. At last I let him 
go, perhaps untactfully, in the day-time, 

" Blind, and in all the loneliness of wings." 

Gossip has told me about his housekeeping : 
how he is thrifty, forages in winter and stores 
up in a hollow tree mice and other prey enough 
for a week's housekeeping. When my own 
goes wrong I sometimes wish that I could go 
and board with the little owl. 

I should like to be admitted to further inti- 
macy with these feathered folk, but perhaps 
they are right in holding me, if not at arms' 
length, at wings' length, and the wings' length 
of a suddenly startled bird is something to 
marvel at. Their wisdom I envy, their sky 



OUR NEIGHBORS 77 

wisdom and earth wisdom, their exquisite skill 
in building, their canny household ways. 
Even through the slight intercourse which 
they permit us, marvellously they enrich our 
lives, as contact with other life inevitably must, 
not only through this sense of fellowship in 
home-building and home-keeping, but through 
the endless charm of music, and motion, and 
color. 

In spring the song of the oriole, unbelievably 
beautiful, comes from trees near by, but he 
never builds close enough. Venturing near 
human habitations, he still jealously guards 
his seclusion. Though he refuses our prof- 
fered string, he sings to us, often pouring out his 
heart among our trees; then, a swift, red- 
golden flash, so swift that the swaying birch- 
leaves seem to go too, and he is away toward 
home. He lives in the huge, stately elm at 
the corner, disdaining lesser residences, and I 
can hear his song, fainter but not less appeal- 
ing, from his own doorway. His brother builds 
in another elm, farther along the busy highway, 
singing high and unafraid above the puffing 



78 FAMILIAR WAYS 

automobiles and the creaking carts ; and surely 
it is a near relative who has his home in a clump 
of tall green trees on the greener hillside. There 
he sings, high and sweet, the morning long. 
Toiling over books and papers, I can hear 
him, and the "God-intoxicated" bobolink 
who lives in the meadow below the hill. To- 
gether they bring back always the story of the 
two nightingales, those symbolic nightingales 
who sang from the laburnum to the young 
Robert Browning after that day of days when 
he had first opened his Shelley and his Keats, 
— too great an intellectual and spiritual experi- 
ence for a single day of boyhood, one would 
think, even for that robust poetic vitality. 

The long elm-branches toss in the wind, 
yet the swaying nest is always safe. On sun- 
shiny days there are such trills of pure and 
varied melody that I cannot work, — for oh, 
how he sings one's childhood back ! The 
music flows across the silences as through the 
discords of the days; surely the oriole has 
found some inner soul of melody in all things ! 

The bobolink keeps house in the meadow- 



OUR NEIGHBORS 79 

grass by the stream just over the fence from 
the highway. I know where it is, though he 
does not think I know, having taken pains to 
ahght, singing his maddest, on reeds and grasses 
far away, and distinctly on my path toward 
home. I have not called on him, and shall 
not, for I too have my reserves. His choice of a 
home shows that he has learned something of 
the hard wisdom of the world. Last year he 
had a devastated threshold, for the mowing 
machine went ruthlessly over that loveliest 
spot of waving meadow-grass where he had 
built. This year he has chosen a place where 
the swamp-grasses are never touched by the 
mowers' knives ; surely I am right in thinking 
he is the same, our neighbor of last year, though 
I cannot be sure, for there is always a certain 
family likeness in the voice. 

Some relatives of his, who live a mile or two 
farther, came before he did, on a green May 
day. I go often to hear them, for, as they 
sing, one and then another, in that little colony 
of songsters, they bring back all the vanished 
Junes, with their wild strawberries and their 



80 FAMILIAR WAYS 

fragrant hay. Yet, as I stroll along the high- 
way toward home in the perfectness of this 
special June, I am glad to hear my own near 
neighbor again, and to watch his rapturous 
flight upward, with lyric trills of song, and his 
dropping low to grass or reed, where he sways 
back and forth in the breeze. It seems to me 
that there is an added madness of assurance 
in his melodies this summer as he sings on, 
unafraid, that all's right with the world; and 
I hold my breath, with a touch of the old Greek 
apprehension of swift turn of fate after too 
perfect moments. Are he and Robert Brown- 
ing a trifle oversure ? 

VI 

Many are the birds that charm us by beauty 
of color and of song; there are others that 
compel our eyes primarily through sheer beauty 
of motion. Such are the wide- winged gulls 
at the not-distant New England shore, with the 
slow and stately rhythm of their white wings; 
such are the eagles that I remember from long 
ago circling majestically against a clear blue 



OUR NEIGHBORS 81 

sky about the high gray cHffs of Mount Par- 
nassus; such are swallows of every kind. 
Bank swallows live near us, the top of certain 
high sand-cliffs being pierced all along its edge 
by their mysterious, enticing thresholds that 
one may not cross. Great delicacy and reserve 
of demeanor is necessary in approaching them, 
for they are careful of the company they keep. 
This year they made no holes in one sand-cliff 
where, last year, many of them dwelt, — a 
mystery of choice to us until we saw the king- 
fisher's nest hollowed out there, and remem- 
bered the grim look of the kingfisher with his 
fierce crest, on a limb by the water, watching 
for his prey. About our roof these swallows 
circle in the open sky at eventide against the 
sunset clouds; they fly low before the coming 
rain, low and higher, swaying, swinging, dip- 
ping in joyousness of motion and grace of un- 
trammelled flight. The little call of the swallow, 
what is it, — thanks for the insect just caught, 
or greeting to neighbor swallow, as they pass 
and repass in the oncoming twilight, like 
"ships that pass in the night"? 



82 FAMILIAR WAYS 

Color and grace of motion together make up 
the loveHness of the blue-bird's flight. These 
gentle creatures light on branch and twig 
about us in earliest spring, pair by pair, in 
radiance of blue raiment against a paler sky, 
while we go on ^tip-toe, lest we frighten them 
away. As they sit with their wise little heads 
on one side, considering, we wonder anxiously 
whether they will find us unworthy of the 
close companionship of adjacent homes. Long 
ago a pair of them nested in a hollow apple 
tree near our old doorway, and successive 
families have occupied birch bark houses 
near the new, their songs encircling the house 
with melody, a little ripple here, a ripple there, 
surely the sweetest note in nature. I should 
rather have the grace of such companioning 
than any other household boon, but often I ask 
in vain. Many call in early autumn to say good- 
by, punctilious and yet distant. A few days 
ago, in late summer, the yard was full of them, 
parents and children ; some, full blue with soft, 
bright breasts, others, evidently fuzzy young- 
sters, with wings just growing blue. Their 



OUR NEIGHBORS 8S 

little chirp sounded from among the birches 
and the wild-cherry tree , in most com- 
panionable fashion, and yet they fled, parent 
and children, across the browning grass, 
leaving us to the yellowing leaf and the 
cricket's chirp, and the mellow loneliness of 
autumn. 

Other bird 'friends we have, and many. 
The little song sparrow makes music for us in 
all seasons, in all weathers, even sometimes 
through a sleepy snatch of song at night. 
The vesper sparrow greets us on the close- 
shorn hills to westward when we walk there at 
sunset; and on summer afternoons, from the 
shady coverts of the adjacent wood, comes the 
full golden melody of the wood thrush, with 
that liquid tone which only thrushes give. I 
have listened, but listened in vain hereabout, 
for the high, celestial note of the hermit, but 
he does not venture so near, inhabiting some 
far region between us and the heavenly 
hills. 

Greatest of all privileges is the charm of the 
minor snatches of song, the momentary glimpses 



84 FAMILIAR WAYS 

of wings, often of visitors we do not know, and 
yet half understand ; — we are wayfarers all ! 
A red-breasted grosbeak comes to chat in 
friendly fashion among the twigs, then flits 
away to his undiscovered threshold. A hum- 
ming-bird calls now and then for a minute at the 
threshold of larkspur or columbine ; his lichen- 
covered home I can imagine, though I have no 
skill to follow his swift flight. The goldfinch 
means a gleam of celestial beauty, as does the 
yellow warbler; and there was one wonderful 
minute when a scarlet tanager paused in a 
birch, the sunshine falling on his bright body 
through the translucent leaves. 

VII 

These and other winged visitants we have, in 
wavering flight or sure, now high, now low, 
drifting past birch leaf and hollyhock, shining 
visitants, with the swift splendor of sunlight on 
wings of blue or red or gold, making us wonder 
why a pallid modern imagination clothes angels 
all in white. The old painters knew better, 
and on Italian canvases and walls one may see 



OUR NEIGHBORS 85 

wings of green and azure, splendid pinions of 
celestial creatures wearing gorgeous markings 
of moth and of butterfly. Oftentimes quick 
wings pass, of we know not what, above pergola 
or sky-light; swift, nameless shadows float 
over yonder waving green meadow ; a sound of 
wings reaches our ears though we do not lift 
our eyes. In their very elusiveness lies the 
deepest appeal of this people of the air; the 
sordid philosopher who said that a bird in the 
hand was worth two in the bush was as grossly 
mistaken as his kind are wont to be, for a bird 
in the bush is worth twenty times twenty in 
the hand. When was anything worth having 
ever capable of being held in the hand ? 

The nearest, yet the farthest, of our neigh- 
bors, one feels a wistful sense of kinship with 
them, and yet, — the distances ! Wordsworth's 

" Stay near me — do not take thy flight ! 
A little longer stay in sight ! " 

in his poem to a butterfly suggests something 
of the baffled longing for companionship that 
marks our intercourse with winged creatures. 
They only, of all living things, know to the 



86 FAMILIAR WAYS 

full this migratory instinct that lies deep in 
human nature, the need of new horizons, the 
deep recurrent stirring at the heart in spring. 
They flit on the edges of our humanness, 
akin, yet not near of kin, piquing our desire, 
quickening our sense of wonder. One watches 
them with dim understanding, and with un- 
confessed or unrealized envy. 

Of all creatures they are the least bound in 
the chain of things, with their brief term of 
earthly ownership, watching their nests for a 
single season and then away, not clogged and 
hampered by property rights, whether of real 
estate, or of heavy flesh and bone. Are not 
their bones filled with air? Free of the uni- 
verse are they, unencumbered for the long 
trail, just this side of being pure spirit. Theirs 
is the charm of that which comes but in mo- 
ments, and which you may not keep; about 
a home, which stands for the settled and 
permanent, lies this haunting mystery of wings 
that come and go between us and the sky. 
They touch the soul within us, quicken the 
sense of quest, for each beat of these encom- 



OUH NEIGHBORS 87 

passing wings stirs something deep within. 
They make us aware of far spaces, of distance, 
freedom, mystery, infinity, — of a sky for the 
human spirit to circle in, even now, even 
now! 



PLAIN COUNTRY 



Like many another person of the present 
day I have, from time to time, travelled as far 
as my means would permit — and a little 
farther — exploring countries new and strange, 
or new and strange to me, climbing high moun- 
tains, sailing broad seas, and making the 
acquaintance of coasts as full of wonder and of 
mystery, swept by the wings of gulls, washed 
by green waves, as were the far shores of 
Odysseus's wide adventure to Odysseus. And 
I have had huge enjoyment in it all, standing 
to watch, at distant corners of the earth, the 
pageant of wind and wave and cloud, trudging 
up unknown hills in a fine mood of adventure, 
driving across mountain passes into countries 
as fresh and as enchanting as if they had been 
created overnight to meet this fresh sense of 
quest. 

88 



PLAIN COUNTRY 89 

Yet sometimes, and oftentimes, I realize 
that no strange shore or wonderful mountain 
range has brought a sense of pleasure quite so 
deep as that which comes at moments in mere 
country, the plain country of the land of home. 
I do not mean any of the show regions of 
America — the glories of the Canadian Rockies, 
or the wonders of the Yosemite. I mean the 
common country of old-fashioned fences and 
winding roads, where tangles of alder and 
of sumac cluster by the gray rails or grayer 
stone — common country, where the hay grows 
long in June, and the woods creep close to the 
hayfields, and a little stream, perhaps, goes 
threading its way softly between the grasses. 

Here is no sense of effort in your enjoyment ; 
all is near and dear, familiar, perhaps for genera- 
tions a part of your forefathers' lives. There 
is no need to try your eyes to take in the mean- 
ing of jagged rock outlines and heaped earth 
masses, or stretches of desert sand. You have 
not purchased an expensive ticket whose worth, 
to the uttermost penny, must be extracted, 
from the panorama before you, making you 



90 FAMILIAR WAYS 

study it anxiously, eager to do your duty by 
every shade and outline. You do not have to 
strain to the sublime, as you do when con- 
fronted by Scenery, capitalized scenery — • 
capitalized in every sense of the word; you 
do but sit quietly upon some green bank, full 
of unforced pleasure that hardly names itself 
pleasure, so unconscious it is. Ah, the relief 
of the encompassing leafy greenness to eyes 
tired by the glare of rock and sand, the exhaust- 
ing glory of the shore ; the rest, in shorn green 
meadow, of muscles wearied by climbing 
rugged mountain faces! 

II 

We are up and away nowadays, speeding 
fast for change; yet in meadows near my own 
doorway I have learned more of the limitless 
variety of nature than I have learned in fol- 
lowing marvels very far. The trees that I 
know best are never twice the same, because 
of the way of the wind with their leaves, of the 
sun upon them, of their noonday shining and 
their evening shadow. Can the sea with its 



PLAIN COUNTRY 91 

waves give more of change than a June meadow 
of long grass, where the wind has its way 
through a long afternoon? Where can you 
find beauty that will surpass these green waves, 
rising, falling, breaking, strewn with blossoms 
of buttercup, daisy, and red clover? The salt 
ocean has no such fragrance as that which 
comes from hay and clover and sweet grass 
newly shorn. Have you ever watched the 
winds and tides in fields of wheat and rye, the 
long golden waves, the swift shadow of bird- 
wings across them, and, just above, against 
the sky, slow-sailing white clouds that drift 
and drift in summer seas of dim blue haze? 
Does it not stand to reason that you will see 
more of endless process if you stay quiet for a 
bit and contemplate the endless variety of 
familiar things than if you shift every minute 
your point of view, never looking the same 
way twice? If you want to see the great 
procession, wait and do not join it ; as a hurry- 
ing part of the pageant you miss the change- 
fulness that comes to you, the rest that stays, 
satisfying that fixed and stable something with- 



92 FAMILIAR WAYS 

in, the permanent you. Wind, sun, and fa- 
miliar water bring home the wonder and the 
mystery of change, when the great winds or the 
least winds are abroad in the branches and 
among the blossoms, and the play of light and 
shade makes quivering etchings of leaf and 
twig upon the grass. Falling showers, smitten 
by the sunlight, great rains that drench and 
flood, and the beauty of mists that come and 
go, shrouding familiar trees, torn by the wind, 
drifting to rest on far hills, are the heritage of 
him who will but stand and watch. The sub- 
lime treads your own pathway, bringing swift 
surprise, as, before a sudden storm, you watch 
peaceful cattle upon the quiet hillside, dream- 
ing woods, wings sailing securely against the 
blue. Presto I the wind is abroad ; startled 
cattle, snuffing; the look of the forest against 
the oncoming dark cloud, the white of shivering 
poplar and shaken aspen against the inky gray, 
the sharp lightning, bring home the wonder 
and the terror of the universe. Yet it is as 
awful in moments of quiet sunshine, did we 
but realize it, as in moments of great crash; 



PLAIN COUNTRY 93 

nor can great upheavals, cataclysms, teach 
us more of endless change and process than 
can moth, dragon-fly, and butterfly, green 
insect wings or gray, aquiver over the earth. 
Of the stream, brown and gold in the depths, 
change is as inexhaustible as of ocean, and 
nearer, sweeter, with all the little ways of 
leaping water, with sun-sparkles upon the 
stony bed between the rippling shadows of 
reed and marsh grass. So, too, is the way of 
the sun with the leaves through the long day 
in the forest — while, far and near, ferns catch 
the light, turn to pale-green flames in the dim- 
ness, and then go out. In the coolness, the 
mossy leafiness of common woodland on a 
common day, amid the rustling of ancient 
leaves under the soft murmur of the tree, one 
may find the magic of constantly shifting beauty, 
and with it the very heart of comfort and of 
peace. 

Ill 

But there are deeper changes whereby we 
share the inner life of nature, our pulses beating 
with her own, while glorying as spectators in 



94 FAMILIAR WAYS 

that outer beauty which marks the year's 
round of experience. Through that winter 
mood of waiting and suspense we dwell with 
the soul of mystery, even among familiar 
encompassing hills and meadows, while brood- 
ing thought and imagination are forever busy 
with knowledge withheld, locked in the grasp 
of the great frosty secret, until, with the first 
touch of thaw, there is quick change at the 
heart of life, the enigma, and soft relenting. 
At the flush of faint color over the topmost 
twigs of tree and shrub, and the breaking spray 
of pale new green upon the woodland seen 
through the radiant, shimmering air of spring, 
there are flashes of hope, and a feeling that one 
is about to know. Then follows the beauty 
that no tongue can tell of the coming of the 
leaves, tiny, vital, translucent in their myriad 
colors, and, in the dance of the least shadows 
on the grass and over sunlit water, we realize 
with a swelling sense of life that there still are 
young leaves and laughter in the world. 

Spring, with its foreboding, expectant heart, 
and the bewildering beauty that cannot find 



PLAIN COUNTRY 95 

ways enough of expression, has a sting, a 
poignancy that no other season has ; the faint, 
questioning loveHness, the timidly advancing, 
then apparently retreating footsteps are invita- 
tions, perhaps most fully understood at home, 
to share its troubled hopes, its fears for the 
light-hung nest, its anxious joyousness. 

As outlines and colors deepen, and the misty 
sunlight of April slips into the assured sun- 
shine of summer, we seem to be sharing an inner 
life and growth, and living at the heart of 
some inconceivably great, expanding, develop- 
ing creature. Mown grass, fresh and falling; 
stacks of hay; fragrances blended and subtle 
of ripening things ; wheat in windrows ; wheat 
in golden sheaves ; rustling leaves of growing 
corn share with us the warm satisfactions of 
summer; we flush with the harvest apple, and 
mature with pear and plum. Those chosen 
things that have stood the strain of living are 
growing ripe in warm sunshine ; there are mel- 
low moments of life triumphantly and deeply 
fulfilling itself. Here, in your own garden, in 
your own dooryard, the passing moments 



96 FAMILIAR WAYS 

bring home to you the culminating splendor 
and glory of the season's changes. 

Later, crisp August days, with their crickets 
and pale stubble fields, bring the sweet secu- 
rity of autumn, full of a sense that uncertain- 
ties are over, and all false hopes forgotten. 
Past browning hillsides; past magic corn- 
shocks in the rich sunshine, with pumpkins 
at their feet; past miles of regal, nodding 
goldenrod one wanders with longing to have 
change stop here forever in such fulfilment. 
The long wild grass burns deeper red; warm 
October glory is all about you; it brims the 
little valleys; it wanders on the hillsides. 

Then comes the beauty that no tongue can 
tell of the falling of the leaves. Dusky red 
of oak, yellow of maple, the little twinkling 
golden leaves of birch, fall and float through 
the hazy air of days of dreamy sunshine and 
blue distance. All things far and near are 
blended in one soft glow of dim color; all 
bring a subtle invitation to perfect peace. 

The wonderful hoar frosts that come with 
the sweet, sharp chill of later autumn, spar- 



PLAIN COUNTRY 97 

kling on twig and brown grass and on asters 
faded on their stalks, in all jewel colors, emerald, 
topaz, and transparent blue of aquamarines, 
slip imperceptibly into hoar frosts sparkling 
over new-fallen snow. It is winter again, 
with the play of snow-flakes with branch and 
twig, hemlock branches and birch tree tops 
bending under their feathery load ; winter, with 
its fine sculptures on fence and roof, with the 
pure white curves of the hills, and the clear 
gold of sunset behind the branches and the 
trunks of the west woods. 

Again comes that winter feeling of change- 
lessness, denoting in reality the deepest change 
of all, as, with other dormant things, you await 
resurrection. 

IV 

So, forever at home in the very heart of 
change itself, you wander at will among things 
gentle and familiar, whose charm is best sought 
in near pathways on your own feet. Neither 
horse nor motor can climb the old rail fences, 
the old stone walls that you must climb to find 



98 FAMILIAR WAYS 

these haunts of ancient peace. The wood 
path, flecked with moss, the shadow of the 
leaves on the slender trail; the worn way 
across the old pasture, fern-beset, among the 
lichen-covered stones, — following such paths, 
while the wood-thrush is calling, calling, and 
the mellow notes float across the perfect after- 
noon, you find your way back to quiet moments, 
before "efficiency" came in, and war came 
back. Or you skirt the meadow in later after- 
noon, when the shadows creep farther and 
farther over the grass which grows cool about 
your feet as evening comes. It may be that a 
bobolink sings not far away, or a red-winged 
blackbird gives the soft home call from a 
bough above the marsh-grasses. Certain it 
is that soft summer sounds of life astir, grow- 
ing softer and sweeter as the shadows deepen, 
come from among the grass and reeds, peeping, 
chirping, violin music of tiny wings. Swallows 
circle overhead where film of cloud, invisible 
before, turns delicate rose, trailing over half 
the heavens, and the moment brings a per- 
ception of perfect oneness^with nature, a pro- 



PLAIN COUNTRY 99 

found sense of being at home. You snuggle 
down and tuck the horizon in about you, with 
all its soft clouds, and rest sweetly, if but 
through the sight of the eyes, in the hollow of 
the encompassing hills. 

Here, come golden moments of pause and 
quiet, snatched from the strife of things, 
charmed moments of understanding the peace 
at nature's heart, mighty rest in mighty strife. 
It is in such instants of perception of a great 
pulse beating with your own that you remem- 
ber nature as the old mother of us all, known 
in her homely ways and household activities, 
whispering sweet and comforting things in 
your ears, not the magnificent mother, source 
and grave of all things living, but the ancient 
singer of lullabies that lead to gentle dreams. 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 



There is really no need for any one to write 
about gardens, — so much has already been 
written, so many wise folk, poets, philosophers, 
gardeners, have set forth in verse and in prose 
the charm of gardens, the plans of gardens, 
the symbolism of gardens, the needs of gar- 
dens. I grasp my pen tightly, turning back 
resolutely to culture of the mind, but the sweet- 
est west wind of all the year, the wind of June, 
blows my papers away, and my bit of garden 
will not let me alone. Chasing my papers, 
I am compelled to stop to arrange a tendril 
about a cord, to free a struggling shoot of 
rose-bush, to pick rag-weed from out the 
forget-me-not bed, and one long grass stem 
from among the California poppies. My gar- 
den has a thousand feminine wiles for keeping 

100 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 101 

my mind upon itself, distracting ways of de- 
manding attention, jealous lest it be forgotten 
for a moment. 

It is not a respectable garden, like those 
of our neighbors, for we tamed a bit of the 
wilderness, and we keep it wild at the edges. 
On one side is a thicket of trees, where wood- 
land things grow, ferns, moccasin plants, run- 
ning pine, Solomon's seal, and a few shy wild 
flowers whose names we do not know. There 
is a little tangle where we coax sweet fern to 
life, and reluctant Scotch heather, resentful 
of our summer heat and homesick for its 
native mists; wild roses also, brought from 
the sea-shore ; least pines and cedars, gathered 
by the wayside and in woods. Here, and 
in the untilled spaces about us, through the 
wilderness grass we sow golden-rod, asters, 
and daisies, and other vagrant things. 

Our garden, to tell the truth, is somewhat 
undefined; it is hard to tell the garden from 
the yard, the yard from the wilderness. The 
bad habit of planting things in the grass has 
grown upon us, making increasing difficulty 



102 FAMILIAR WAYS 

for the man with the lawn-mower in distin- 
guishing the desert from the sown. Mowing 
day is a day of many a gallant dash to rescue 
some shrinking green thing from the unre- 
garding knives ; and the big Irishman, rubbing 
his forehead in perplexity when he finds a 
huge bit of ragweed or a stray mullein, calls 
out despairingly : "Lady, did you plant that ?" 
Even so, he guillotined a choice fern, some 
lady slippers, and two seedling birches. May 
the gods be kinder to him than he deserves, 
and spare his own red neck in time of peril ! 

But the charm of blossoming things grow- 
ing out of the green needs no apology. Our 
crocuses wear a look, when, blue, white, or 
yellow, they open after the snow, as if God, 
and not a kind young friend, had planted them. 
Not all at once, but after long winter waiting, 
and early spring days of suspense lest frost 
has killed them, we year by year see "a crowd, 
a host of golden daffodils ", not a marching 
host, but a straggling host, an hundred strong, 
here, there, everywhere, in and out among 
the white birches in the wakening green of 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 103 

the grass. Ah, if the ghost of WilHam Words- 
worth would wander this way some sunny 
April day ! One, by the south porch, comes 
long. *' before the swallow dares ", and " takes 
the winds of March ", and us, with beauty. 

Our garden would never do as a basis of an 
article in a gardening book or a Lady's Mag- 
azine. It is not one of those methodical, 
unnatural gardens, where all the seeds that 
are sown germinate, where all bulbs and trans- 
planted roots grow properly, where all blossoms 
turn out in expected colors, where a whole 
row of hollyhocks come up without gaps, with 
that false uniformity characteristic of hand- 
books. It is no placid spot, of gradual growth, 
but a thing of wild hopes and sudden fears, 
of quick inspirations unknown to the careful 
husbandman, unprophesied in the Farmer's 
Almanac; of hasty plantings, some of which 
prove fortunate, some lead to nothing; of 
surprising successes, of blasting defeats. It 
seems almost at times as if it too had fleet, 
imaginative glimpses of what might be, and 
shared our sense of triumph or mood of failure. 



104 FAMILIAR WAYS 

For nature is by no means the orderly, inch- 
by-inch personage we are taught in scientific 
text-books to think her. She also has her 
moments of inspiration, of rapid and luxu- 
riant growth, and my garden makes me aware 
of her swift divinings, her blind hopes, her 
passionate impulses that wax and wane. 

II 

If it is the gardening of ignorance, at least 
it is full of the joy of discovery. To well- 
instructed friends I should be ashamed to 
confess that, busy for many years with mere 
books, ideas, intellectual apparatus, I knew 
not annuals from perennials. Biennials are 
still a puzzle; though I know the theoretical 
meaning well enough, I find it hard to discover 
the moment of bloom. When that guaran- 
teed to flower every second year does not 
blossom at all, what are you to think of the 
book? Haunting problems perplex us. W^ere 
those bulbs that never came up planted upside 
down? Are they feeling their way China- 
ward? Has this ever happened with any of 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 105 

those vital ideas which we have planted firmly, 
by the best pedagogical methods, in the mind 
of youth, and have never heard from afterward ? 
Puzzles enough to make one lose one's wits 
spring up in one's own garden; there is no 
need to tramp the Andes nor traverse the 
rings of Saturn for nature's riddles to read. 

Of our defeats, where are the hundred many- 
colored crocuses, planted in that mild Novem- 
ber that led to the wickedest of cold winters? 
Where are the seven and twenty least pines, 
none more than six inches tall, that were to 
grow into a wild hedge, sweet smelling in the 
sun? There was a pathos about them as they 
perished in sleet and snow as of babies dying 
in this European war. Alas for my little 
field of wheat, one of the sudden inspirations, 
sown on the vacant lot, of wheat and scarlet 
poppies, scarlet English poppies, glowing in 
anticipation as they glow in memory from 
fields of Oxfordshire long ago ! Burning heat 
and drouth withered the fresh young grain, 
and the poppies rested forever in poppy seed. 
One cries aloud for unachieved tulip, peony. 



106 FAMILIAR WAYS 

roses, full of a sense of pathos in "all things 
sown and mown"! Yet, after all, perhaps 
it is from the flowers that never grow that 
one has the greatest delight, those that one 
sees with the mind's eye, yet to be, lovely in 
line and in color, those that, in fancy, send 
out odors more appealing than we find when 
reality cheats us of the fairness of the vision. 
The " prophetic soul ", dreaming on flowers to 
come, blends remembered beauty with the 
hope of future perfectness. 

With the quiver of life about us in tendril 
and shining leaf, our present joy in growing 
things grows deeper, as colors and fragrances 
of our actual garden blend with colors and 
fragrances from long ago. Woodbine over 
the rafters takes on the semblance of la petite 
chambre verte in Normandy where we lunched 
one September noon, many years gone by, 
French grace of phrase and skill in cookery 
lending a charm to the rudest of arbors, the 
simplest of omelettes, the whitest crisp bread 
in all the world, the most ascetic of red wines. 
Do those vines too turn to glorified scarlet 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 107 

in October frost, or has the little green chamber 
turned a more awful red in that great fighting 
line? In April the clear crimson of our tulips 
brings back those plucked wild in March 
on hills near Florence in long-vanished spring 
sunshine; and the little pink-tipped daisies 
that border the bed make one see again those 
in Alpine grass, high on the great slopes above 
Lausanne, with the glory of the lake, and Savoy, 
and Mont Blanc spread out before; those in 
English meadows in sweet, chill early summer. 
What subtle associations come on the breath 
of lilacs, of lilies-of-the-valley, of a few sprigs 
of blossoming heliotrope, recalling an almost 
tropical riot of color in a great bed of helio- 
trope on the shore of Lake Como, with every 
soft shade of lavender, deepening to richest 
purple, and a cloud of many-tinted purple 
butterflies hovering above ! 

Ill 

It is but a step from that bed to the paths 
of the villa garden in which it grew; and so 
I tread again in memory stately Italian gardens 



108 FAMILIAR WAYS 

by the Tiber, luxuriant gardens by the Italian 
lakes ; and Rome, Tivoli, Frascati, Val D'Arno 
come back in memory with perpetual freshness 
in their sound of running water, their brimming 
fountains in the cool shade of ilex trees. One, 
near Florence, I had, seemingly, all to myself 
in a fortnight of convalescence. Here were 
gravelled paths, where grass straggled beyond 
the edges; here neglected roses grow in love- 
liness over crumbling walls of pale yellow. 
There, evening by evening, a nightingale sang, 
and the little owl that says "Q", the owl that 
Shelley loved, came night by night. So, 
these humble paths of my garden, which are 
hardly paths at all, lead into greater; unfor- 
gotten gardens come back in sound, color, 
fragrance, and these slip into the gardens of 
history, poetry, story, — all because of this 
wayward bit of earth, at which I gaze in 
pride of possession, a "poor thing, yet my 
own." 

I like to see, in fancy, tall lilies growing 
in the garden of Boccaccio, — so much of 
whiteness, of purity, in that doubly-tainted 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 109 

atmosphere ! My weeding goes oftentimes to 
the measure of Morris' lines : 

" I know a Httle garden close 
Set thick with lily and red rose 
Where I would wander, if I might, 
From dewy dawn to dewy night, 
And have one with me wandering." 

Digging with a trowel, sometimes I touch 
the brown earth, questioning if it is real, as 
Swinburne's verses sing to me : 

** In a coign of a cliff between lowland and highland, 
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, 
Walled round with rocks as an inland island. 
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea." 

But there is a better refuge still when all 
goes wrong with the tilled garden, when you 
cannot keep pace with the weeds, or when you 
pull up by mistake cherished plants; when 
many waterings fail. Moments come when, 
impatient of ownership and of responsibility, 
you run away to wood or to meadow. Our 
garden extends to the grass and the goldenrod 
growing on the hillside, the blue asters by the 
way, the yellowing fern in the woodland. 
Many are the hidden garden paths, green- 



110 FAMILIAR WAYS 

grown with moss, or brown with autumn 
leaves, where we venture reverently in the 
cool of the day, not touching leaf or flower. 
Here the first fernlets uncurl in the spring, 
and hepatica and anemone open in the wind. 
In such hidden sanctuary one wins escape 
from worry, and recognizes anew, through 
the silences and the murmur of the leaves, 
that the burden of this blundering universe 
is the Creator's, not one's own. 

IV 

Greater than the joy of memory, and of 
story or verse, is the joy of the present moment, 
when one seems to put down roots, to put out 
tendrils with one's growing things, and finds 
an absolute content in coming alive with one's 
garden. If some of our hopes have withered, 
on the other hand, many have come to happy 
maturity, sharing with us their summer glory. 
What could be more responsive than our 
vines, honeysuckle, ampelopsis, bitter-sweet, 
actinidias, wistarias, and those tangled wood- 
bines transplanted from the thicket and run- 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 111 

ning riot over porch and roof? With Lamb, 
one quotes over and over Marvell's 

" Curl me about, ye gadding vines," 

as one goes on, tying a tendril here, loosing 
one there, in the constant vine-pedagogy 
needed by these impulsive things, so swift 
to put out unnumbered shoots, so slow in find- 
ing something to cling to, so piteously at the 
mercy of the wind. 

Our lilacs and syringas grow apace; Lom- 
bardy and Carolina poplars flourish at the edge, 
with little leaves that make a rippling noise 
in the wind, as of pattering rain. Royal 
golden tulips, pure gold even at the heart, 
deign to give us of their magnificence; lark- 
spur, with its hint of distance, blossoms in 
misty blue; hollyhocks, all arow, as befits an 
old-fashioned front door, grow tall and flower 
in "wind-dark" red, in gold, in white, in soft- 
roseate colors. Foxglove invitingly swings its 
bells for wandering bees ; and climbing roses, 
red and pink, climb and blossom, blossom 
and climb, almost wantonly, catching at rafter 



112 FAMILIAR WAYS 

and cord with strong tendrils; grape-vines 
hang clusters against our white pillars, with 
soft bloom of purple under the sheltering green. 
Iris grows in the mid-tangle and about the bird- 
bath, tall and protecting; and white madonna 
lilies bring the silence of perfect beauty to 
summer afternoons. 

Here are fragrances that create Oriental 
moments in hard-working New England days : 
the old-fashioned honeysuckle, our joy and 
pride, over the pergola ; quaint pinks from old- 
time gardens ; delicate columbine ; roses, roses, 
thyme; a little veering of the wind and it 
is the breath of the sweet-briar that comes; 
then the wild-wood odor of fern, moss, and pine, 
and an oozy meadow-smell from the tangle. 
On a hot, hot day, gathering moisture of com- 
ing rain draws forth latent fragrance, as soft 
clouds drift near. Moments of sweetness come 
in sultry midsummer noons and in the cool- 
ness of twilight; from the swift spattering 
of summer rain upon the earth; and from 
charmed afternoons of autumn when mellow 
sunshine falls upon ripening grapes. 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 113 

V 

A garden deepens your sense of friendliness 
with the whole green earth, and is, moreover, 
a great promoter of good-fellowship with 
human-kind; the friendships that you make 
over your garden have sweetness and enduring 
roots. What generosities grow in gardens ! 
What interchange of blossom and fragrance ! 
Old friends bring you bulbs and roots, so that 
you have something of them growing green 
beside you; new friends come, bearing gifts 
of seed and stalk. I try vainly to tell off on 
my fingers the kindly thoughts of others 
that have taken root and blossomed within 
me : one gave me blue iris ; one yellow pansies 
for the grave of a four-footed friend; one 
hepaticas for the thicket; another, lilies of 
the valley and columbine; another, violets, 
blue and white. The sweet, old-fashioned 
pinks, the older-fashioned thyme, the deepest 
red hollyhocks came from the most lovely 
little old lady the world has ever known. 
Friends steal in with trowels, and plant for 
us, God knows what, God knows where ! I 



114 FAMILIAR WAYS 

come home dragging a market basket filled 
to overflowing by the autumn generosity of 
a neighbor; rich in hollyhock plants, lilies, 
dahlias, chrysanthemums, — so heavy that I 
have to sit down on the old stone wall to rest. 
Here I open a little packet of seed, — an odd 
little white flower, he told me, like a forget- 
me-not, from the Pope's garden in Rome. 
I have since sowed it, breathing a prayer over 
my stubborn Protestant soil that the world 
may not forget him, Pius Tenth, for we have 
need of such as he ! 

So one reaches the hand of fellowship among 
the blossoms, and flower roots and deeper 
roots grow down into the soul together; the 
fellowship of human kind and flower kind are 
one. Back of each blossom I see the friendly 
face of the giver, and, if the friendly faces 
grow fewer as one grows older, one but values 
them the more. 

Nor do our lesser comrades lack welcome 
here. Little toads hop in and out among 
the green stalks, pausing sometimes to have 
their backs stroked by a straw; squirrels 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 115 

chatter in neighborly fashion from the trees; 
we are not altogether inhospitable to that 
uninvited guest, our neighbor's quacking hen, 
which renders us a rough version of The Lotus 
Eaters at hot noontides. Birds come and go; 
we are never without the companionship of 
wings, swift or slow. Bumble-bees visit fox- 
glove and rose; humming-birds and butter- 
flies blossom there ; and day by day the honey- 
suckle pastures the village honey bees. Some- 
times a little voice breaks the stillness, and we 
know that our friend the cricket has crept 
near, to warn us that all summers pass. 

VI 

Perhaps it was my new acquaintance, the 
gardener, showing me the Venus fly-trap, 
and sensitive plants shrinking from the touch, 
who made me forever more sensitiye in recog- 
nizing something of personality in plants; 
the lines of individuality seem little less defi- 
nite than in human beings. Our Boston 
ivy, growing on the stone wall, is as methodical, 
as logical as you would expect it to be; the 



116 FAMILIAR WAYS 

tiny tendrils, once having with well-considered 
purpose found their appointed place, cling 
firmly for all time. On the other hand, there 
are our wayward wistarias; who knows the 
mind of a wistaria? One, the most interest- 
ing, is a live thing of sudden inspiration, sprung 
from some wild impulse at nature's heart. 
Planted in the spring, it waited, to all appear- 
ances dead, until late July, then burst into 
sudden leaf, and grew as if it could not stop 
growing; as if the soul of an artist, alive with 
the glory of creating, were making itself visible 
in the quickening stem and the fern-like 
leaves. Each year we mark in it a period of 
swift and splendid growing, a period of fertile 
quiescence. 

One could marvel long over this plant in- 
dividuality of life and of habit. Some are 
too vagrant and too free to domesticate; 
that wild and beautiful thing, the cardinal 
flower, died in captivity; how had we ever 
dared to think we could tame her? It was a 
moist and sheltered spot, with, we hoped, 
associations that she would find familiar. 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 117 

but who could ever capture that regal, elusive 
creature ? 

The sense of personality in growing things 
is intensified by many of the processes you 
go through in your relationships with them. 
The garden comes alive, in almost human 
ways, if you work at it long enough ; and you 
lose yourself in pondering on the humanity 
of all growing things, or the vegetableness of 
humanity. There is joy in giving plants water 
and yet more water when the pallor of thirst 
is on them, and in watching them raise their 
heads again in radiant freshness. In autumn 
you must wrap many of them warmly, putting 
them to bed, gathering leaves in brown, still 
days of calm, trying to make them stay down, 
spite of the wilful wind. Wrappings must 
be tied about rose-tree and vine; rebellious 
wistaria must be swathed; and newly planted 
little pines must be, remembering the infant 
mortality among the others, swaddled and 
bandaged like Italian babies of the North 
End. Here is no shame if the garments do 
not come off all winter long ! With the ap- 



118 FAMILIAR WAYS 

pearance of the first crocus in the spring, 
with the discovery, as coverings are thrown 
off the flower-beds, of green shoots just peep- 
ing through the dark earth, comes the inevi- 
table thrill that welcomes new life, human or 
other. 

VII 

Strange questions come to mind in garden 
paths, spring time and autumn both. From 
the many seeds sown, the many bulbs planted, 
why do so few grow? Of nature's waste of 
seed, shown in the great heaps of elm and of 
maple, winged seeds all, what is the cause? 
What the result ? So I stop and ponder, when 
seeds from all the hillsides blow hither on the 
winds of God. Does all this floating thistle- 
down, this silken-winged drift of milkweed, 
take root and spring anew? That reckless 
sowing of the seed, that thwarting by clod and 
stone, give "thoughts that lie too deep for 
tears." 

I seem to know the mind of the Creator 
better for my gardening ; the yearning, quick- 



GARDENS, REAL AND IMAGINED 119 

ening desire, the strange obstacles, — do not 
things turn out wrong for Him also? Of that 
seed He sows in mind and soul, what propor- 
tion comes up? Does He too now and then 
forget what seed He has sown in this plot or 
in that? Do strange and unexpected things 
grow too in His garden, pinky-purple, spotted 
things where white lilies should have blossomed ? 
Does He have difficulty in telling the differ- 
ence between weeds and flowers, wheat and 
tares ? 

So may garden walks, like all walks, lead you 
to infinity, that infinity of wonder wherein 
we begin and wherein we end. For a garden 
is a hope, an expectation, and an uncertainty, 
where little turns out as was expected; where 
many a joyous surprise and many a disap- 
pointment await; where results are incal- 
culable beforehand. If some of your annual 
hopes wither, yet some are perennial. You 
are ever on the qui vive, the alert; you walk 
on the borders of the unexplained, in the pres- 
ence of the mystery of seed. 

In a garden we began, the seed of human 



120 FAMILIAR WAYS 

life first set in that Garden of Eden, as sacred 
story tells us ; and in a kind of solemn garden 
we end : "That which thou so west is not quick- 
ened except it die." So, in deepest thought, 
may time be annihilated, and the first moment 
of the race blend with the last upon one's 
garden path. 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 



Of all the aspects of nature's life which an 
imaginative sympathy lets us, to a certain 
extent, share, there is none which appeals to 
me quite so strongly as that which I find in 
trees. Doubtless this is partly because, far 
from sea and from mountains, I was brought 
up with trees, whose personalities slowly 
emerged, in individual fashion, from the en- 
compassing mass of things, as did my near of 
kin in flesh and blood. Those brooding maples 
that nursed my infancy crooned me many an 
ancient lullaby, and my earliest childhood felt 
a protecting quality in their massive trunks 
and overshadowing leaves, an almost human 
kindliness, combined with cool, green, leafy 
indifference to those petty distinctions of right 
and wrong that vexed my pagan soul. How 

121 



122 FAMILIAR WAYS 

many times have I climbed, branch by branch, 
above the moral standards of my family, to 
hide in a sheltering tree-top, up where the 
diminishing trunk swayed perilously against 
the blue ! What sense of escape, what sense 
of catholic sympathy in feeling the cool bark 
against my flushed and wicked little cheek ! 

This sense of personality in trees was strength- 
ened by an early habit of sketching human 
character in terms of trees, or the other way 
about. The lesser elms, with their graceful 
way of standing so debonairly in green meadows 
or at gateways, with an obvious attempt to 
please, became to me the sign and symbol of 
those acquaintances who developed social gifts ; 
I never saw certain tall old rugged oaks, with 
a fine sternness of expression, without recalling 
my grandfather; and the Lombardy poplar, 
forever straining upward, became the emblem 
of the idealist whose aspiration overtaxed the 
supporting roots. Whether it was because 
there were not trees enough to go round, in 
the matter of interpreting human character- 
istics, or that I did not know human beings 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 123 

enough to match all the trees with which I was 
intimate, I gradually outgrew this childish 
anthropomorphism, only enough of it remain- 
ing to tinge with an odd sense of personality 
my appreciation of individuality in tree beauty, 
or in the ugliness of certain trees. 

Locusts, I remember, gnarled, broken, in- 
credibly tall, standing about gray, paintless 
houses whose day is done, and wearing an 
overplus of expression, half malign. There is 
something at once impotent and villainous about 
some of these old trees, as if they had sucked 
the life out of the dwellers in these houses, and 
their wicked roots were slowly eating the bones, 
yet still unsatisfied. Not only near deserted 
doorways, but along melancholy roadsides I 
have seen them huddled together in evil groups, 
plotting perhaps, with a furtive air of secrecy ; 
yet there are many whose peculiarity of look 
gives them but an odd distinction. I can- 
not recall any other tree whose youth is 
so full of charm, with acacia-like delicacy of 
shaded leaves, whose neglected age is so often 
ugly, — worn, withered, ragged, — with none 



124 FAMILIAR WAYS 

of the beauty and expressiveness of age, such 
as one sees in ancient oak or apple tree. 

On the distinctive characteristics of the 
many types, their varied beauty, their pecuHar 
ways of taking experience, one could muse in 
odd moments for a life-time, even the long, 
cool life of a tree. What individuality of bark 
and leaf, of bare branches against a winter 
sky ! What differences of expression in beat- 
ing rain, or falling snow, or wind from out the 
west ! Foremost among those that one re- 
members with quiet leaves against the blue 
are perhaps the beeches; their lichen-grown 
gray trunks and the beauty of their translucent 
foliage one may not forget. There is always 
a storied look about them, a touch of imagina- 
tive suggestiveness, bringing half glimpses into 
magic lands. No other tree has quite this 
quality of delicacy and of strength at once, a 
momentary charm, as of the flash of drifting 
butterflies, with time-defying power to stand 
a thousand years. Long ago, in that odd task 
of finding among trees resemblances to human 
friends and kin, I used to ponder who was like 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 125 

the beech, but found no one among the sturdy 
Puritan folk whom I knew. It must be some 
undiscovered type whose acquaintance would 
mean an entry into worlds of wonder and worlds 
of beauty ; I knew no artists in my childhood. 
The impression of personality is strong, as I 
recall a company of incredibly huge and beau- 
tiful beeches in an English park, seen long 
ago, set in the freshness of undying grass 
about an old country seat; I can recall those 
lesser, but exquisite ones, that once made the 
edge of a remembered wood as the very edge of 
fairyland, cut down in an absentee winter by 
the knavery of tenants ; but most clearly of all 
can I recall the glimpse, from many years gone 
by, of early sunshine in a young beech wood, 
the mass of leaves above the slender stems 
making in my memory an immortality of living 
light. 

The deep beauty of the pine comes back to 
me in ways that I may not number, — through 
its fragrance on sun-warmed days in sheltered, 
shadowy places; through the expression of 
wind-blown pines against the sea; through 



126 FAMILIAR WAYS 

tossing branches of dusky green against a 
February sky of deepening blue, — a sharp 
tang of wind in the air; through the still look 
of tall, expectant heads against gray rolling 
clouds before the rain. To westward, a forest 
of pines makes a soft, dark line against the 
sunsets ; and here and there, in the surrounding 
country, distinctive figures stand, in solitary 
grandeur, against the sky, or in stately com- 
panies of four or five on a gentle hill slope, 
or by the still water of the lake, where long 
reflections give back the beauty, line for line. 
By the shining water, and the shadowed water, 
of a little inland river, I know a place of tall 
pines, where sunlight glints through brown 
trunks, faintly tinted with green moss, touch- 
ing the bed of pine needles here and there with 
gold. Here, if anywhere, one may know how 
much of the charm of the pine is made up of 
fragrance and sound, while the deep, sweet, 
varied music of the high boughs blends with 
the murmur of the river. Yet the trees in 
lonely places are no more significant than those 
growing in spots invaded by human life; in 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 127 

all the stir and motion of village or city, a 
certain permanent quiet rests about a tree. 
I know three pines that rise above asphalted 
walks and shingled roofs; below is the con- 
tinued sound of passing feet, but the wind of 
immemorial time is ever in their branches, 
and our din is hushed in their primeval mur- 
mur and primeval silence. 

Among the most individual trees are the 
slim cedars of the Hudson River hills and New 
England pastures, growing among gray rock 
and fern, akin to the Italian cypresses in their 
singleness of thrust. Here, as there, this 
living green is not thrilled through with light, 
as is the case with other trees, but the sunlight 
makes a golden halo about them everywhere. 
Not accident, but some deep sense of artistic 
fitness, has made them in Italy the watchers 
of the dead. Here too we see them by white 
gravestones, and along old stone fences or on 
upland slopes, always giving a touch of definite- 
ness, of character to the landscape. Poignantly 
expressive, self-contained, they seem, like cer- 
tain human faces, to make one more keenly 



128 FAMILIAR WAYS 

aware of the whiteness of cloud, and the depth 
of blue in the sky above. 

II 

I make periodical visits to certain tree friends 
to see how they are faring. Why not ? They 
cannot come to me. When one vanishes, 
through old age, or a new disease, or the often 
cruel and tasteless exigencies of landscape 
gardening, I miss it as I should an old and 
valued relative. The huge ancient elm, but 
lately gone from the centre of the orchard, has 
left a surprisingly large gap, as did a kindred 
elm in a distant state, to whom I said good-by 
many years ago. After these partings the sky 
seems disconcertingly large and vacant, as it 
does in the passing of one's human friends. 
Some, by the mercy of the winds and the 
gracious gift of rain, are still standing in their 
places. One is a great oak, of enormous 
trunk and wide-spreading branches, gnarled, 
moss-grown, expressive, which I call Ygdrasil, 
remembering the tree of life of northern my- 
thology. Each year, the long-awaited leaves of 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 129 

spring, rose-flushed and creamy green, betray 
the fresh youth and rising Hfe at the heart of 
its hoary age. These great low oaks, one here, 
one there, near or distant in this gently rolling 
country, recall the English woodlands, Sher- 
wood Forest, Windsor, those hospitable forests 
where every suggestion is of shelter and security. 
The sweep and droop of the great leafy arms, 
the circling shelter, make one wonder if this 
protecting tree suggested to the ancient Celts, 
King Arthur among them, the type of their 
circular houses, and perchance the Table 
Round. In such shaded places, mediaeval 
tales of the lover and his lady who wandered 
forest-ward and lived there through green and 
happy years of eternal springtime, no longer 
seem incredible, so homelike is it under the 
leafy roof through which the stars blink. For 
them, as for us, the springtime brought the 
dawning of fresh color on the old, old gnarled 
branches; did they know also in autumn the 
glow, in sheltered places, of red-brown shades, 
richly blended, as in ancient tapestries ? 

Our nearest neighbors among trees are not 



130 FAMILIAR WAYS 

enduring oaks, but young poplars, which make 
forever a soft, murmuring noise, as of the com- 
ing of April rain, and delicate white birches, 
which bring us, spring and summer long, the 
shilling companionship of their leaves. The 
last thing at night, in the darkness, the first 
in the morning, before I open my eyes, I hear 
them; the voice of the wind is in them, the 
voice of the wood, and often have I kept vigil 
with them, when 

" The little green leaves would not let me alone in 
my sleep." 

These birches at times seem almost unendur- 
ably human; sensitive, feminine, they reflect 
in their rippling every change in the lightest 
breeze; in the great gales they sway excitedly 
this way and that with rustling and whisper; 
very meekly they bow to earth under insistent 
ice and snow. 

In May, the shimmer of the branches makes 
a glory all about; the least seedlings on the 
slope below catch the light in their young 
leaves; and farther away, against a grassy 
hillside, a line of slender birches stand, thrilled 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 131 

through by the sun, Kke a row of pale green 
young priestesses, vestal virgins, in a procession 
of spring. Even in autumn, the little golden 
leaves seem to have a touch of joyous promise, 
as they twinkle good-by. 

Certain tree friends one recalls this way, in 
moments of charmed color; so maples, best- 
remembered perhaps in their cool, deep summer 
shade, above the clear deep green of the grass ; 
or else in autumn, when pale, clear yellow 
leaves, like light made into color, stretch, 
canopy after canopy, overhead, and one walks 
with a gleaming, rustling carpet under foot 
among the tree trunks which stand tall and 
dark in this shining at the fall of the year. 
What more than oriental glory of royal bed 
these high-piled golden leaves made in child- 
hood, wherein to hide with some beloved book, 
pausing now and then to watch the dim blue 
haze of the October distance and dream the 
future ! 

I can make friends with almost every kind 
of tree that is really a tree, and that looks as 
if it had grown out of the dirt of the earth, but 



132 FAMILIAR WAYS 

there are some which rouse in me quick an- 
tipathy, such as I feel in the presence of an 
uncongenial person. There are mountain 
ashes ; they are like ladies of exceedingly 
artificial manner, wearing ear-rings; their 
crude color of leaf and berry seems as if de- 
vised by a milliner to satisfy prevailing bad 
taste. I should not at any time be surprised 
to find that they do not grow from roots, but 
are supported by wires from underneath. 
Nor could I ever achieve intimacy with a 
spruce, or any of those over-regular trees that 
suggest more the hand of man, with his limited 
imagination and his love of monotony, than 
the infinite variety and inexhaustible creative 
power of nature's self. I know that they are 
favorite lawn trees, and that they are supposed 
to have an especial elegance, but is not this a 
taste which has survived from the seventeenth 
and eighteenth century passion for uniformity ? 
In that passion lay a devitalizing tendency, a 
loss of understanding of delicate distinctions 
and of individualities of line and of color. 
However, these trees have a certain perfunc- 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 133 

tory dignity and even, at times, of grandeur; 
they wear the air of holding important official 
positions, and you must respect them in their 
aloofness. But they hold you at arm's length ; 
there is no approach; you cannot get near 
them, nor sit under them, nor lean comfortably 
against the bark when the need comes to sit 
very still and think. 

Ill 

There is something oddly human in the 
experiences of trees, or, perhaps it would be 
wiser to say something tree-like, arboreal in 
us. I have heard more than one plausible 
tale of trees left lonely, dying, perhaps from 
lack of companionship. Surely it was not 
merely added exposure to the winds that 
killed the great ash whose skeleton I saw 
standing, solitary and grim, on a White Moun- 
tain hillside, whence his fellows had been cut 
away. Left so alone, they never live, if they 
have grown up with others, a countryman 
wise in tree-lore told me. Who has failed to 
notice the look as of human fear of naked. 



134 FAMILIAR WAYS 

shivering tree-tops against inky clouds in an 
oncoming storm, the deep green or the pale 
under parts of the leaves distinct and awful in 
the ominous quiet or the ominous swaying? 
In a storm and in calm one seems to share the 
mood of familiar trees. There are times when 
the touch of rough bark, the cool, green, leafy 
sympathy of trees, brings something more 
than human companionship. It may be a 
sympathy which antedates individual experi- 
ence, and belongs to race history, going back 
to ancient time, 

" Then, when the first of Druids was a child." 

From their dimly understood personalities 
spring hidden consolations, perchance from 
old sad fate or glad, forgotten years ago. 

" Dark yew that graspest at the stones 
And dippest toward the dreamless head," 

I have often repeated with appreciation, but 
I always feel inclined to read it "you", the 
dignity, the solemn individuality of the tree 
making it need the intimacy of personal ad- 
dress. Surely there is between human kind 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 135 

and trees a kinship immemorial, antedating 
the fret and fever of the nerves, bringing old 
coolnesses to serve as refuge, making us know 
the time when spring was no torment, autumn 
no regret. Still we share something of the 
fresh joyousness of the young green leaves in 
their unfolding upon the air, their dancing in 
the wind, while below the creeping roots gain 
surer and surer hold upon the earth. What 
consciousness they have I do not know, but at 
times I almost envy them their feeling of 
stability, of permanence. Deep-rooted, almost 
free of the shifting and veering of things that 
make the tragedy, and the challenge, of our 
lives, they know of change little except its 
beauty, in the rippling of color in spring and 
autumn, long year by year. 

Perhaps most companionable of all are the 
apple trees, drawing near human dwellings, 
generously sharing blossom, shade, and fruit, 
as if in full realization of the brotherhood of 
men and of trees. Young apple trees in May, 
in orchard, yard, or meadow, make a brave 
showing in their wealth of foliage and blossom, 



136 FAMILIAR WAYS 

but more significant are old apple trees, in 
their gnarled and characteristic beauty, their 
gray and green of lichen, bark, and leaf. The 
charm of forgotten summers seems to linger here, 
the humming of vanished bees, the crooning 
song of blue-birds, with the swift flash of their 
wings; one associates their silentness with a 
soft hum and murmur of life not their own. 
The blossoming of an ancient apple tree, its 
petals falling, rose-tinted or pure white, from 
hoary, crumbling branches to the living green 
of young grass, is as the very blooming of the 
tree of life in undying renewal. These, of all 
trees, are most closely associated with our 
experience and nearest our human lives; 
through branches heavy with blossom one 
sees the lighted windows of friendly homes, 
and knows one's neighbors near. The beauty, 
charm, atmosphere of the apple tree seems 
without mystery or remoteness; near our 
hearths, they share our daily existence, and 
we grow gray together. Among my dead are 
two beloved apple trees, known only in their 
hoary age and the beauty of their slow waning 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 137 

and fading, but calling always to mind that 
paradise where stands "an old tree with blos- 
soms ", in lovely immortality. 

It is odd that this home-keeping tree should, 
in ballad and old story, be closely associated 
with supernatural happenings and other-world 
adventure, as ballad, romance, and learned 
treatise tell. It was under an apple tree, a 
grafted apple tree, that the mediaeval Eurydice, 
dame Meroudys, was found, by the wooer from 
the under- world, and carried away to "a fair 
country where there was neither hill nor dale", 
to be rescued later from an enchanted sleep 
that seemed like death, by the sweet harping 
of her husband. King Orfeo. Tam Lin was 
dreaming under an apple tree, — like many 
a homely Tam, tired with digging and delv- 
ing, — when the fairies took him ; and that 
evil enchantress of Arthurian story, Morgan 
le Fay, found Lancelot under an apple tree 
and bewitched him there. The hero, Ogier 
le Danois, wandering sadly, an hundred years 
old, came to an orchard, ate an apple, and 
lo! a beautiful supernatural lady who carried 



138 FAMILIAR WAYS 

him away, young again with her ring on his 
finger, to two hundred years of more than 
earthly joy with her in Avalon. How many 
an old man, sleeping at his own doorway under 
an apple tree, perchance in spring blossom, 
has dreamed a dream like this ! Perhaps 
this association of marvel with the sweet, 
familiar beauty of every day, reflects the 
sense of folk more child-like than we, — it 
may be wiser, — that the threshold of this 
world and that of a world unseen are nearer 
than we dream. 

The call of the other world came to Bran, 
as Celtic legend, charmingly translated by 
Lady Gregory, tells, through the sweet music 
of a beckoning apple branch, bearing white 
blossoms; and the "quiet man ", with "high 
looks ", who summoned Cormac to the land of 
heart's desire, bore "a shining branch, having 
nine apples of red gold, on his shoulder. And 
it is delightful the sound of that branch was, 
and no one on earth would keep in mind any 
want or trouble or tiredness when that branch 
was shaken for him." Seers of beauty, this 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 139 

primitive people were aware of the mystery 
of invitation that comes with every waving 
branch ; swaying leaf and blossom ever beckon 
toward the unknown; half bewitched, we 
follow, but stop at the barred gateway of eye 
and ear. The Queen of Fairies, aghast at 
losing her human lover, cried out : 

" * But had I kend. Tarn Lin,' she says, 
' What now this night I see, 
I wad hae ta*en out thy twa grey een 
And put in twa een o* tree.' " 

Did she mean that she would have made him 
dull and blind, or that, to keep him with her, 
she should have granted him some woodland 
insight that would have made him aware of 
values that had escaped him? 

IV 

Are we not all drawn beyond ourselves by 
the charm of opening vistas under overshadow- 
ing tree branches? The challenge and appeal 
of the edge of a wood where interlacing light 
and shade and dim forest paths invite our feet 
we may not resist. Murmuring leaves forever 



140 FAMILIAR WAYS 

stir the imagination, pique desire, and make 
us aware of the narrow Hmits of ourselves. 
When one stops to think, the fundamental 
mystery of our existence is linked with a tree; 
that tree of knowledge of good and evil, — I 
should like to watch the manner of its growing, 
sit in its shade ! For that matter, we have 
sat in its shade, the learned in divinity tell us, 
our race-life long. Watching now the sun- 
light filtering through the leaves of June, I 
ponder, unsatisfied, as to why a tree was 
chosen as a symbol of the darkest problem of 
our existence. 

No beckoning branch has as yet secured me 
vision of that "comely level land" of Celtic 
story, where many blossoms fall, through the 
long day of lasting weather, and the wave 
forever washes "a pure white cliff at the edge 
of the sea, getting its warmth from the sun", 
but mere photographs of mere earthly trees 
upon my walls keep alive and vital within me 
strange countries, never to be forgotten. These 
have a power of rest and refreshment that few 
other pictured things can bring; something 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 141 

of the primitive sense of the forest as refuge 
blends with a feeHng of vistas opening out 
into the unknown. There is one which makes 
me half shut my eyes, and walk again down 
solemn avenues of ilex, Italian sunshine at the 
far end of this deep shade glinting on the 
rippling water of an old fountain. Ilexes of 
the Janiculum, with Saint Peter's dome in 
shadowy distance; cypresses of the Villa 
d'Este, tall and dark in the mellow light, keep- 
ing, beyond those crumbling stone parapets, 
eternal watch over the Roman Campagna; 
olive trees of Tivoli, — a mere photograph 
costing a few francs a dozen, — yet the very 
look of gnarled trunk and knotted branch is 
here ; and, when the afternoon sunlight reaches 
that picture, touches the grass, and shines on 
the olive leaves, you would swear that it was 
creeping through real trees. Other olives I 
have, immortally old, growing on the side of 
Mount Parnassus near the sacred Castalian 
spring, and affording, through their scarred and 
ancient branches, a glimpse into immemorial 
time, down that wonderful valley where the 



142 FAMILIAR WAYS 

sun god strode shining to his temple at ancient 
Delphi. 

It is not only through the invitation of the 
waving branch that trees summon us to the 
distances; standing on far-off hill or at the 
sea edge, they pique us, seeming to see what 
we do not. Something of a sentinel look is 
worn by Lombardy poplars, as one sees them 
in their native plain, or the great level lands 
of Normandy, watching the long white roads, 
guarding slow, gleaming waters, and distant 
red-roofed houses. By neglected driveway, or 
half-forgotten site of what once was home, a 
single, aging Lombardy poplar, ragged, up- 
right, has the look of some old soldier, still 
standing at his post when the army has gone 
by. Old or young, they are forever alert, 
expectant at their long vigil, watching the 
sunrises, peering at the stars, on tip-toe to 
look over the horizon. Something of the 
mystic significance of the poplar the Greeks 
must have realized; in the Odyssey, poplars 
grow in the garden of Persephone. 

What the poplars strive for, other trees that 



THE COMRADESHIP OF TREES 143 

I have known seemed to accomplish. No- 
where else in the vegetable world have I seen 
such individuality of expression as I recall in 
a brave company of wind-scarred hemlocks, 
aged, majestic, huge, that stood in the wood 
to westward, their ragged heads high above 
other trees. Vanished now, they have left 
forever in my mind and soul their outline 
against the sky, that meant high challenge; 
and my choice of these in character interpreta- 
tion meant a sacred tribute to the strongest 
spirit I knew among my kind. Experience was 
written on them as on human faces ; only 
Vedder among artists can interpret trees like 
this, with all the expressiveness of their beaten, 
ancient heads. Militant, undefeated, they 
stood undaunted at the very edge of things, as 
if they saw other horizons, and had seen them 
always. No other symbol, among all the 
beautiful and significant things that earth 
has afforded, has been quite so profoundly 
suggestive as those old hemlocks in the west, 
on the sky line between this world and the 
next. 



BROTHER FIRE 



As we sit by the fire on the hearth on a cold 
winter night, snug in the sense of the smoulder- 
ing coals inside, and the high-piled snow out- 
side, at times I wield the poker among the 
logs to better the blaze, at times lean back 
lazily and read to the accompaniment of sing- 
ing flame. The brave west door bars out the 
wind; the slant roof sheds the heavy snow; 
for a few minutes of blessed truce the abstract 
questions of human destiny cease to perplex — • 

" For I am brimful of the friendliness 
That in a little cottage I have found." 

Then come moments when, sleepily, through 
half-shut eyes, one sees other fires on other 
far-off hearths, and follows the path of flame 
down the long trail of human life. Old camp 

144 



BROTHER FIRE 145 

fires of shepherd folk on Asian plains rekindle 
here; what did our Aryan ancestors talk 
about, one wonders, as they gathered round 
at night to toast their toes on that prehistoric 
trek? Here glow again great hearth fires of 
Mycenean kings, and huge war fires of em- 
battled hosts on wide European plains or in 
deep valleys of the Caucasus. Here one sees 
new fires blazing in new human homes in times 
of peace, as the "seed of fire" is carried from 
hearth to hearth, to quicken life afresh. 

Digging in the ashes, full of a sense of pos- 
session and of comfort, one ponders on this 
earliest and deepest human need, the need of 
man for a little place of his own. The instinct 
is fundamental; from nest of bird to lion's 
lair and on to human threshold, it runs through 
all nature. In all probability the hearth was 
the first thing made by man; it is that to 
which, with all his wandering instincts, he 
most surely returns. It is the very centre of 
earthly existence, this homely heap of brick 
or stone, sheltering the spark of divine fire, the 
red coals fading imperceptibly here to gray 



146 FAMILIAR WAYS 

ash, and glowing again in ever fresh en- 
kindling. 

Spreading one's hands before its comfort one 
feels ever a bit guilty, remembering the fingers 
that go cold. When did this conscience of 
the hearth stone first arrive, to break the 
savage gloating over possession.^ Were other 
outlaws invited to share the camp-fire heat in 
earliest primitive f oik- wandering ? It is in- 
deed but by slow degrees that we have learned 
that the measure of our affection for our own 
firesides is the measure of our responsibility 
in the matter of sharing the coals. Those 
pagan homes whose hearths were altars, as 
seen under the wide sky of Greece, were un- 
consciously significant, prophetic. Whether 
one's chief care be that the fire leap upward, 
or outward to warm one's fellow man, its flame 
must be the flame of sacrifice. 

It is well that one remember this and all 
its far-reaching implications, as one sits by the 
hearth, inviting to closer companionship one's 
soul, perchance one's neighbor, and, chief of 
all. Brother Fire. 



BROTHER FIRE 147 

II 

I count it an honor that this guest of mine 
upon the hearth has vouchsafed me a kind of 
intimacy which has reheved many an other- 
wise lonely hour. Adrift in the universe, it is 
well to make friends with the elements if we 
can, and Brother Fire is the closest friend, as 
well as the fiercest foe, among them all. It is 
not only for the comfort and the charm of his 
presence that I value him, and the sense he 
brings as of perpetual shining of the sun on 
darkest nights and grayest days, but for the 
mental quickening that he affords, for no other 
acquaintance gives more intellectual and spirit- 
ual stimulus. The flickering flame, the swift 
sparks, have some subtle power of lighting 
ideas and kindling thought to leaping fire. 
The warmth on one's fingers and cheeks mounts 
to one's brain; life and experience, and ideas 
garnered from books, take on a kindly glow. 

It is odd that so much of personality clings 
to this elemental friend. Where he is, abide 
rest and comfort; finding him, one finds 
companionship, and is not alone. Not long 



148 FAMILIAR WAYS 

ago, entering the sitting-room in early morn- 
ing, I felt a living presence there, and spoke, 
asking who it might be, for there was a stir 
and a whisper, as of life going on. Then I 
saw that, at an unwonted hour, a fresh-laid 
fire had inadvertently kindled from old coals 
beneath the ash, and Brother Fire, an unex- 
pected guest, was making himself merrily at 
home. In his presence is ever this breath 
and murmur of being; one learns to converse 
with him in ancient speech, antedating words. 
No one else, perhaps, has ever felt so deeply 
the comradeship with fire as did St. Francis of 
Assisi, and in the whole history of imaginative 
sympathy with so-called inanimate things there 
is nothing more curious than some phases of 
this intimacy. "Above all other creatures 
wanting reason he loved the sun and fire with 
most affection", is written in The Mirror of 
Perfection. On a time, the record continues, 
sitting next the fire, the flame caught his linen 
clothes or hosen near the knee, but he forbade 
that it be quenched, saying: "Nay, dearest 
brother, harm not the fire," and but for a 



BROTHER FIRE 149 

venturesome warden, who disobeyed his bidding 
and put out the flame, the saint would have 
perished in that close embrace of his beloved. 
"For whatever necessity urged him, he would 
never extinguish a fire, or a lamp, or a candle, 
with so much pity was he moved toward it." 
On another occasion, when his cell on Mount 
Alverna was all aflame, he rescued a certain 
skin which he wore over him at night, then 
suffered remorse because, in his avarice, he 
had refused to let Brother Fire eat the skin 
for which he yearned; nor would the saint 
ever cover himself with that skin again. Alas 
for the complex entangling of human affections ! 
Which of St. Francis's other intimates in the 
kingdom of his family, the beasts, — ox, ass, or 
wolf, had given up that skin in the first place? 
But his love of fire was his intensest love, and 
his great Canticle of the Sun — to him fairer 
than other created things, and ** radiant with 
great splendor" — sings of Brother Wind, and 
Sister Water, and our Sister, Mother Earth, 
as dependent upon this central source of life 
and light and heat : 



150 FAMILIAR WAYS 

"For he is beautiful and joyful and robust and 
strong." 

Eye and imagination alike are spellbound 
as one watches; even the sparks which run 
hither and yon in irregular lines, and circles 
along the soot have ever a wayward charm. 
Chief among the delights in the companion- 
ship of Brother Fire is his beauty, which 
is inexhaustible and of myriad kinds, of "in- 
finite variety." Whether the resistless charm 
of leaping flame is more compelling, or the 
vivid red of glowing coal under gathering 
clear white ash, is hard to say. Never twice 
the same, here is a beauty which, like that 
of music, ceases to be as it comes into being. 
This vanishing beauty of line and passionate 
color, gold, red, pure light, with flashes often- 
times of green or of blue, has ever the beckon- 
ing appeal of all that is swift and fleet. Flames 
and waves are alike in their symbolic, spirit- 
charm, of always coming to be. In both, the 
remorseless change at the heart of things seems 
for once — at least in the fires of peace and 
the waves of sunny weather — not tragic, but 



BROTHER FIRE 151 

a source of exquisite delight, that swift, living 
thing, the soul, deriving joy from something 
as swift and vivid as itself. 

It is a beauty that I must follow wherever 
I see it, for it has the challenge of all questing 
things, and I recall a goodly company of "bon- 
fires I have known." Those that I have 
helped make have served a double purpose, 
of wise destruction and aesthetic charm. 
Hoary branches of ancient trees ; old papers, 
outworn and outlawed, have together turned 
to glory before vanishing into merciful nothing- 
ness; so dead flowers, too lovely in memory 
for any less lovely death. Decadent pieces 
of contemporary fiction, too inflammable to 
be kept in the house, have had here one, and 
one only, moment of cleanliness, as the purify- 
ing flame has swept the print from the paper 
that it but defiled. Was I mistaken, or did 
the bonfire at this moment have a peculiar, 
unpleasant odor, as of a soul in decay ? Here, 
too, have perished old, old sacred books, worn 
and soiled by long and reverent use, Bibles, 
hymn-books, and books of common prayer; 



152 FAMILIAR WAYS 

did not the ascending smoke have something 
of the odor of sanctity as the souls of these 
volumes returned in flame, out under the open 
sky, to that pure spiritual impulse that gave 
them birth ? 

It is not only my own; I would ever share 
my neighbor's bonfire, if may be. Ofttimes 
at nightfall from my window I watch its leap- 
ing, golden light against the gathering dusk; 
sometimes it lights the glimmering green of 
grass and heavily foliaged trees; sometimes I 
see its passion of living color against the white 
radiance of snow. If I but catch a glimpse from 
far of a bonfire over the hill or down the road, 
I must follow, watching from a distance. Last 
night I had great joy in one whose splendid 
springing fire, in the dusky autumn evening, 
lighted an orchard corner, etching outlines of 
bare apple-tree boughs in dark network on 
barn door and side in ruddy light. Most allur- 
ing of all are the autumn fires of leaves along 
the village streets — when amid the ascending 
smoke, little creeping flames devour the red 
and brown glory of the leaves; or when light 



BROTHER FIRE 153 

and flame leap softly against the shadows of 
an Indian summer night, making another 
sunshine. In October days, when the haze 
of my neighbor's bonfires blends with the 
dim, blue haze of all things, I fall to thinking, 
not unpleasantly, of that ultimate bonfire, 
prophesied by science and Scripture alike, 
when the elements shall melt with fervent 
heat. Foreshado wings of this I had but 
lately, when I saw the great building where 
my work of life has been done, burning from 
end to end; so many years of life and work 
seeming to vanish in smoke; while those 
friendly windows, sunny spaces in the shaded 
recesses of an old library, windows over which 
trailing tendrils of ivy nodded, through which 
companionable ideas came and went, turned 
into terrible windows of fiame, through which 
one looked out upon — what ? 

Ill 

We can never wholly escape from a feeling 
of the sacredness of fire; wherever we see it, 
it stirs within us something from long ago of 



154 FAMILIAR WAYS 

the most beautiful of primitive beliefs; like 
St. Francis, we are fire-worshippers all. The 
village blacksmith's shop, with the deep glow 
at its shadowed heart, and its wild shower of 
sparks as iron is smitten, recalls ancient mys- 
teries ; and common bonfires relight the altars 
of ancient faiths. One I recall from a recent 
May, when earth was fresh with cool young 
grass and streams were full, and in recalling 
it I seem to be remembering something farther 
back than all the springtimes I have known. 
In a wide green space beside the golf links the 
smoke ascends as from an altar fire, and I 
watch again a primitive rite, perhaps a sacri- 
fice to some earth-goddess of wood and stream. 
Thin gray smoke half veils the soft greens of 
the wood, and of the meadow-grass, through 
which slow water trickles. To the clear golden 
flame in the gathering twilight minister an 
old man, a leaping child, a gambolHng dog. 
To what goddess do they bring sacrifice .^^ 
The goddess of Cleanliness — the only one we 
have now, in exchange for a whole celestial 
hierarchy; to her they burn rubbish. Per- 



BROTHER FIRE 155 

haps the flames on any altar suflace to keep 
our souls alive ! Long after these ceremonies 
are over I watch — the smoke-fragrance, with 
its immemorial suggestions, in my nostrils, 
while the fire slowly flickers, dies, vanishing 
like a gigantic firefly. Some large, symbolic 
suggestion is given by these bonfires of spring, 
and I do not doubt that they are remnants of 
pagan worship, celebrating casting off the old, 
the coming of new life. Watching clouds of 
smoke pouring upward till they fill my whole 
sunken meadow with a cloudy grayness, against 
which the flames spring high; watching my 
neighbor between two slender cedars as, with 
a long staff, he ministers to flame, I cannot 
help seeing leaping sacrificial fires at ^gina 
or at Delphi, against the clear blue sky. 

There is small reason for wonder at our 
instinctive reverence; our lives are circled 
by fire, by the splendor and the mystery of 
the stars. Of this the sun at dawn, rising 
from the rim of water in the east, reminds us, 
as does the evening star in the fading rose 
color of the west. Early legend bears wit- 



156 FAMILIAR WAYS 

ness to our perpetual concern with flame; no 
old story is more glorious than that of the 
Titan Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods 
and speeding with it in a trail of flying sparks 
to man. It hints ever of guidance; the torch 
has marshalled marching hosts of men, and 
led lone wanderers to safety, flaming against 
the cloud. Bonfire, it is said, means beacon- 
fire, and something of beacon significance 
attaches to light and fire everywhere. Lights 
in far windows across the intervale, shining out 
through dusky pine boughs; long lines of 
light of city streets or village ways, or of wide 
bridges across dark waters with rippling golden 
reflections; distant light-houses signalling 
across dim wastes of sea ; the myriad lights of 
shore cities watched from the receding deck as 
one sails away — for anywhere — have some- 
thing of beacon character, as have the many 
other ways of flame : the fire upon our neigh- 
bors' hearths, the light in certain faces, the 
light of sun and stars. For light is fire, and 
fire is — what ? 

Surely the central heart of us, and of all the 



BROTHER FIRE 157 

universe, the source of all existence, as the 
source of all destruction. What means this 
recent carping at the nebular hypothesis, that 
magnificent conjecture that this infinity of 
matter started in as living, whirling flame? 
This new planetesimal theory that earth and 
other heavenly bodies were evolved by slow 
accretion out of a cold something or nothing- 
ness, seems at first glance less appealing; and 
yet the idea in the latter of constantly waxing 
heat may, upon consideration, suit our sense of 
cosmic fitness better than that other thought 
of slow waning, until the divine fire has quite 
died out of our inmost being, and we shall hit 
against some celestial body and vanish in 
blessed flame. I dearly love an hypothesis; 
this exact creature, science, shames us all by 
the unabashed audacity of her guesses. Surely 
we may take our choice of the two celestial 
fairy-stories ; in either case, there is something 
at the heart of us that attests the truth of our 
nearness to waxing and waning heat ; the very 
working of our minds betrays the ways of fire. 
Watching the persistent manner in which 



158 FAMILIAR WAYS 

flame plays smokily around a place about 
to kindle, disappearing, reappearing in a single 
flash, coming more often until it burns with 
pure, steady blaze, we realize that nothing 
else in nature so closely resembles the working 
of the human mind, the human soul. Even 
thus come .and go hope, and faith, and 
love, fading, failing, persisting, triumphantly 
burning. 

Does this sense of deep intimacy with the 
fire on the hearth come from our far origin 
in flame itself, or our slow waxing toward the 
goal of fire? It is the centre of earthly life; 
from uncounted ages it has been found the 
most fitting tribute on altars erected to what- 
soever gods; thinkers and poets who have 
given profound interpretations of existence 
have found it the most fitting emblem of the 
enduring life of the soul. No other symbol 
can perfectly suggest the godhead, from the 
Hebrew burning bush to the words of Mechtild 
of Magdeburg: "Our God is a consuming fire, 
ineffably tending upward above all creatures, 
endlessly, sweetly, everlastingly burning. As 



BROTHER FIRE 159 

vital heat, holding eternal life in itself, this 
hath produced all things from itself." 

Dante, the poet of the soul, never so 
satisfactorily read as by the fire on the hearth, 
thought in flame and light. The sun in his 
burning is the one symbol of the Love which 
moves through all things ; flame is the only 
perfect figure for intensity and reality of love. 
Dante's paradise is passionate with flame and 
light; purgatory has something of it, but 
shaded and dim; and the inferno is inferno 
partly from being shut down from light and 
air and fire. But already in inferno there are 
hints of enkindling; flamelets show the way 
toward paradise to the travelers, who at the 
end are left "pure and disposed to mount 
unto the stars." In paradise, the angels' faces 
are living flame; the angels are described as 
live sparks. The words, the figures, used to 
express feeling and processes of thought are 
words of burning, flaming, mounting upward; 
there are flames upon the foreheads of the 
saints in the Rose of the Blessed. Through 
all this runs something of the terrible joy- 



160 FAMILIAR WAYS 

ousness of fire; and the life eternal has the 
passion and the beauty of mounting flame. 

So one's hearth of an evening, through its 
leaping fire, its soft glow of coal, both brings 
back that primal glow of light aijd heat through 
endless space, and blazes the way to paradise. 
Gazing at it, we are aware of supreine charm, 
this ultimate beauty making us forget all other, 
whatever its appeal of color, outline, fragrance, 
as something after all cold, external, remote 
from this consuming central loveliness dis- 
covered in naught save fire. There are mo- 
ments when it seems that, if we were not so 
drowsy, we might penetrate the utmost mys- 
tery and understand this miracle of life in 
death. This bright, fierce, fearful creature, 
who destroys with magnificence of utter horror, 
murmurs sweet songs upon one's hearth, and 
suggests a something tender and friendly at 
the heart of the great terror of the universe. 



THE THRESHOLD 



There are times when I grow impatient 
of our threshold, it is so new, and consequently 
so expressionless. Under the green door, 
wide to admit whatever may come of life, it 
waits, hospitable and expectant, but it is as 
yet unworn. No hollows tell of the coming 
and going of patient and impatient feet; no 
dead have gone forth over it toward that vast 
threshold that waits us all; nor has the foot 
of wise physician touched it, coming to usher 
new life over the threshold of the earth. It 
is ignorant, slow to learn even the little 
wisdom we have brought it, and yet experience 
comes, for it guards a busy doorway. Young 
seekers after knowledge cross and recross it, 
for ours is an academic world. Gladly we 
share our crumb and pour our cup — small, 

161 



162 FAMILIAR WAYS 

small, yet blue with the blue of far distance 

— with these young wayfarers, pilgrims of 
the soul, who stop with us for a moment now 
and then in the endless quest of youth. I 
like the sound of their swift footsteps, with 
the touch of eagerness, of question, and the 
firm note of assurance; already they feel the 
goal. Even if no bride has paused upon our 
door-step, joyously venturing into the un- 
known, radiant-faced maidens bring their 
fiances for our benediction; breathlessly they 
study our house-plan, look approvingly or 
otherwise at our dishes, and glance shyly at 
our Catering for Two. Whatever hospitality 
we offer means receiving more than we give, 
for in all this friendly coming and going across 
our threshold we feel a sense of fellowship 
with firesides that we shall never see. 

We have other, and many, guests, seen and 
unseen. When the crisp, busy winter days, 
and the busier days of spring, are over; when 
all are gone and no one else uses the knocker 

— old friends step from old books to visit 
us : Shakespeare, with his timeless wisdom. 



THE THRESHOLD 163 

droll Lamb, and tender Thackeray, whom, 
in jest and in earnest, we understand better 
than we do more modern acquaintances. Old, 
charmed days come back to linger with us, 
golden moments of delight in new beauty or 
new insight, by far sea-shore or distant moun- 
tainside. In the summer silences, now and 
then old sorrows knock, ever so gently; they 
have been trained to be unobtrusive, and we 
are too fully occupied to entertain them often. 
Through the warm fragrances of honeysuckle, 
rose, and sweetbrier, while drowsy birds chirp 
outside, they sometimes enter and possess the 
house, but with new faces, for 

" Sorrows change 
Into not altogether sorrow like." 

Sometimes when the eternal struggle between 
the two human impulses to go, to stay, leaves 
the former triumphant, I fling forth, impatient 
of the limitations of my own threshold. 
Though the little white house with the droop- 
ing roof looks the embodiment of home and 
of sheltering peace, for the time I will none 
of it, being breathless for knowledge of how 



164 FAMILIAR WAYS 

life has fared with others. Lingering watch- 
fully along the open road, I read much of the 
experience of my neighbors, human and other, 
written on their doorways. The bank-swallows, 
with their fascinating thresholds in the sand 
cliff near by; the orioles, with their safe, 
high thresholds of silken thread; the squirrel, 
whose doorway is a hole in a decayed chest- 
nut; the woodchuck, into whose house I 
almost stepped, uninvited, are of undying 
interest. I know an old frog who lives down 
by a bend in the river, a philosopher, a friendly 
Diogenes, crooning and booming from his damp 
and charming residence, sheltered by reeds 
and lily-pads. His surprised and scolding 
protest the other night when a canoe, gliding 
too near, violated the sanctity of his watery 
threshold, roused sympathy of full under- 
standing in me. We are not so far as we think 
from the stages of unobtrusive life that go on 
in meadow and wayside. The wood near 
us is one great threshold of innumerable homes 
that suggest a hundred points of contact with 
our own; through the silences, bright, brave 



THE THRESHOLD 165 

eyes watch the intruder from beyond the 
guarded doorways. I feel my pride in house- 
building put to shame by these little houses, 
often stronghold and larder in one, hidden 
with wise cunning, and showing a tender and 
secret wisdom shut from me. 

I like to watch, too, people at their door- 
ways : the white-headed carpenter, who sits 
on the front step of his little brown house by 
the aqueduct ; the bent old woman at the 
edge of the wood who banks her tiny habita- 
tion with leaves when winter comes her way; 
the "spinsters and the knitters in the sun", 
on their old-fashioned porches in the old- 
fashioned villages near by. From all the 
walks and ways of life what knowledge have 
these folk brought home; word, or look, or 
gesture may perhaps bring some fragment 
of their hard-won wisdom to me as I pass. 
The wise ways of mothers with their children, 
and the charm of old faces, I see often through 
the lighted pane. If, sometimes, rough words 
resound ; if the uncanny howling of the phono- 
graph, the modern banshee, is heard through 



166 FAMILIAR WAYS 

the open doorways of the poor, one hears 
too words that are the very melody of human 
hfe. Music floats to me across these thresh- 
olds, sometimes fine and sweet and far; two 
afternoons ago, the Pilgrim Chorus from 
"Tannhauser ", played by some one who under- 
stood, stole through the leaves and set the 
pace for me, coming, as music should, as a 
divine surprise. 

There is nothing that more fully betrays 
the individuality of the dwellers within than 
these entrance ways through which they come 
and go between their arcana, their secret 
selves, and the world outside. Character is 
written on a doorway, and human history 
on a gate-post. As I stroll past the lodges 
of the great estates hereabout, the stately 
hospitality of one tells me all I wish to know 
about the indwelling human spirit, for the 
generous paths are open, the wide driveways 
and curious close-clipped gardens are free 
to all; while the churlish sign of another, 
"Positively no admittance ", makes up a fairly 
complete biography. Certain doors wear 



THE THRESHOLD 167 

always an expression of the wisdom that 
reigns within. One is that of the village 
cobbler, who sits forever at work in his tiny- 
shop, among his many lasts, pieces of leather 
with their pungent smell, shoemaker's wax, 
awls, needles, and innumerable instruments 
whose names I do not know. He mends holes, 
puts on rubber heels, and performs other 
cunning deeds, for his is the ancient and honor- 
able task of fitting the human pilgrim for the 
endless way, and he does it well, being of 
incorruptible honesty. When the latest muck- 
raking article about corruption in this or that 
leaves me in despair about the race of man- 
kind, I am sometimes tempted to cut holes 
in my shoes that I may have excuse for going 
down to watch the cobbler. He has solved 
the Labor Problem by laboring all the hours 
of daylight; at night the uncurtained window 
shows him often busy by candle-light, his 
head bent in the fashion belonging only to those 
who take absorbing interest in their tasks. I 
have never yet succeeded in getting him to 
utter a single sentence about anything but 



168 FAMILIAR WAYS 

shoes, but watching his silent, busy toil, I 
feel in the presence of one who Knows. 

There are other thresholds that encourage 
belief in the worth of life, at which I feel like 
taking the shoes from off my feet, such holy 
living and dying has been carried on there. 
Crossing one, I feel at once the jolly and in- 
domitable courage of a widowed mother, who, 
worn out by the struggle for existence, lately 
fell ill, but fought her way back from the very 
gates of death when recovery was impossible, 
her physicians said, that she might protect 
her growing boys and girls a little longer. 
Such tales give one thoughts one hardly dare 
fathom about the reach of the human will; 
truly, were it not for the record written on 
certain thresholds of our kind, we should faint 
and fail altogether, I fancy, in this allotted 
task of life. 

II 

From these habitations which have some- 
thing of the secret of true living to share with 
him who enters, I turn sometimes toward 



THE THRESHOLD 169 

deserted abiding-places, impressive in the si- 
lence of life gone by. There is one with worn 
gray stone steps that lead to a grass-grown 
threshold out under the open sky. Lilacs 
blossom by the door-step; old-fashioned pink 
roses tell when June is there, but the house 
has vanished forever, and will not give up its 
garnered wisdom. Not far is a fine, old-fash- 
ioned, uninhabited farmhouse, which, in spite 
of the encompassing quiet, looks as if life still 
stirred within. But tendrils of woodbine which 
have reached out from each side of the front 
door have clasped hands across the portal; 
the tangle of sweet, blossoming things — lilies 
of the valley, narcissus, periwinkle, and purple 
iris — are neglected in the shade of the tall 
solemn pines, and of clustering lilac and ragged 
syringa. 

I can think of no more charming place for 
a new home than this, with its beautiful, 
rough stone gate-posts, its sheltering apple 
trees, and its vines, vines everywhere, over 
the house, up the trees, and in great masses 
over the stone wall — woodbine, bittersweet, 



170 FAMILIAR WAYS 

clematis, wistaria, tangled and entwined in 
loveliness of leaf and blossom. Pathos clings 
to it now, and it rouses wistful wonder, as 
does every spot where the flame of human 
life has gone up and out, whether sloping- 
roofed cottage of New England, or gray-rock 
mountain site of prehistoric city on the road 
to Epidaurus, dreaming against the blue- 
green sky of Greece, with eagles circling round. 
There are other silent doorways that are 
full of eloquent appeal, such as the church- 
yard in our busy village, with motors and street- 
cars whizzing by, and many footsteps crossing 
and recrossing it past the old white headstones. 
It gets no moments for itself and for eternity 
except at dim midnight. There is a still older 
one in the ancient village to westward, set, 
with its gray and weather-beaten slabs, moss- 
touched, half hidden by long grass, about 
the old white church that wears the charm 
of an elder day, with its quaint windows and 
its faded blue blinds. Over all spreads the 
shadow of a gigantic oak under which, it is 
said, the apostle Eliot used to preach to the 



THE THRESHOLD 171 

Indians. Generations of the faithful have 
worn that threshold of the house of God, and 
have won their rest in the deep shade without. 
The quiet hospitality invites us; with the 
old, consuming curiosity we wait for a little 
near those grass-grown doorways, silent, lest 
some shade of the larger significance escape 
us. Over this vast threshold one steps to — 
what ? 

In visiting my vanished neighbors I often 
find relief, for I like, when watching their 
abiding-places, either vacant doorways or the 
resting-places where they lie snugly tucked 
up in mother earth, to fancy that they lived 
well and bravely, facing the difilculties and 
the puzzles that we are facing now, victorious 
on the whole. Their hospitality is restful 
compared with that of some of the living, 
whose dwelling-places resound with anxious 
talk and question, loud debate and argument, 
and problems — you would think to hear 
them that human life had never been a prob- 
lem before our time ! I have an idea that 
part of this is mistaken zeal for well-being. 



172 FAMILIAR WAYS 

that home should be the abiding-place of peace, 
and that he who has solved the problems of 
his own fireside has made his best and wisest 
step toward solving the problem of the whole. 
The only unfortunate side of that other- 
wise perfect relaxation, walking, is that it 
sooner or later sets you to thinking; the slow 
jogging on of one's footsteps almost inevitably 
stirs one's brain, and then, one's mind is busy 
again, trying to solve the old riddle of existence ! 
So, pondering, I walk until I am tired, then 
wander back, eager for the shelter of my own 
threshold, and glad to sink down upon it, 
unconsciously typifying the deepest paradox 
of human thought, the need of endless motion, 
the dream of endless rest. Those two old 
Greek philosophers who, like all philosophers 
since, were busy with the eternal apparent 
flux and change in things — that greatest 
and most tragic of all earth's problems, the 
glory and the despair of thinkers since the 
dawn of time — doubtless held opposing 
theories partly because they had different 
habits. Heraclitus, with his doctrine of con- 



THE THRESHOLD 173 

slant shifting and endless motion through 
all being, probably paced and paced woodland 
walks and city streets and sea-shore, where 
he watched the waves ; Parmenides, who 
taught eternal fixity, doubtless sat ruminating 
upon his own door-step, and was sure that 
all is stable and permanent. 

As I sit upon my own, weary, somewhat 
dusty, and full of a sense of the recurring irony 
of life, I think, half-drowsily, while fireflies 
pass now and then against the soft darkness of 
the leaves beyond, of the significance of the 
threshold. To all of us, human, or bird, or 
beast, it means refuge; it has thus a sanctity 
that nothing else in the wide world possesses. 
It brings the joy of the familiar, the settled, 
to relieve the haunting sense of endless quest. 
This longing for the unchanging, sought through 
shifting theologies, philosophies, systems of 
thought, may, after all, be profounder than 
this sense of ceaseless process with which it 
is constantly at war. Of this longing the 
threshold is our best and most constant symbol. 
It stands for man's first faith, and for his final 



174 FAMILIAR WAYS 

faith in life. The fact that he can fashion it 
bears witness to his deep beHef in permanency ; 
sitting upon it, he dreams his dream of stable 
existence — even, if he be so minded, of the 
time, or the eternity, when the immemorial 
hope of the race may come true in everlast- 
ingness. Whatever belief the threshold may 
possess is not that of ignorance, or knowledge 
withheld ; there is utter pathos in the thought 
that this, the symbol of the lasting, must, 
more than any other part of the house, bear 
witness to all there is of change. The thresh- 
old survives flood and fire, wars and revolu- 
tions, cyclones, material and immaterial, ex- 
ternal and internal. That enduring trust in 
home, one of the deepest things in human 
nature, is magnificent in this universe of con- 
stant flux and devastating change. Its sign 
and token, the threshold, flings its challenge 
to accident, disaster, sickness, death, for 

" It is more strong than death, 
Being strong as love." 



OLD TRAILS 



At our doorway we find it hard to tell 
whether the nearness or the distances are 
more enticing. The shade of one's own trees 
is grateful, and the small pink-and-white 
clover that blossoms in the lawn close to the 
earth is sweet; yet the far-away paths are 
always calling, calling, as they must ever to 
human souls. Past the blue delphiniums of 
the border, themselves suggestive of distance, 
as a subtle-minded gardener once told us, to 
the hazy blue of the distant hill is an inevi- 
table journey for the eye, and where the eye 
wanders the feet would fain follow. Wherever 
we glance, we see fixed and permanent sur- 
roundings slipping into the beginning of trails. 
Our neighbor's trim green lawn, surrounded 

175 



176 FAMILIAR WAYS 

by the tidiest hedge in the world, under a huge, 
overshadowing elm, would seem to be a very 
abiding-place, stationary and unchanging, yet 
it is here that we get our first glimpse of the 
highway, and one glance at the open road 
is sometimes enough to set the feet a-going. 
Another way, one sees the living green of sun- 
light in the wild grass and least birch-trees 
on the hillside, and may not stay, for a little 
wind entices, and one follows with swift feet 
down the slope, through the intervale where 
a stream wanders, up the hill where it runs 
riot in the long, waving grass, to a sunny bit 
of road which lingers as if waiting for a com- 
rade before entering the shadow of the wood. 
As we stand wavering on the threshold, 
uncertain whether to go or stay, spring calls 
to us in the early note of bird or the cry of the 
hylas, in young greens and faint rose tints 
that run swiftly over distant hill and wood; 
or autumn beckons, with its magic, haze- 
haunted distances, and its gray-blue mists 
beyond the oaks that burn deep-red with the 
late fires of fall. Even winter, sometimes 



OLD TRAILS 177 

austerely, over white snow that seems the 
end of things, sometimes gayly, with tingling 
in the blood, stings one forth, over crisp paths, 
by naked, lovely branches against a clear, 
cold sky, past roadsides where every branch 
and withered blossom bends with its soft 
weight of new-fallen snow. And the call of 
the summer nights, the charm of the road 
one cannot see, who can resist that? The 
familiar pathways are full of challenge of the 
unknown; sweeter, more penetrating odors 
creep out in the darkness, from dusky tangles 
of vine and shadowy fields; the common 
roadways seem to end in stars. 

This is a gently rolling country, that lin- 
gers in its passage toward the sea, by many 
a low-lying meadow and reedy stream; and 
through it, here, there, and everywhere, a 
little loitering river wanders its own wet way. 
If we lack opportunities for steep climbing, 
yet there are gentle heights to tempt our feet. 
One, that to which the delphinium beckons, 
you reach, after your tramp by the roadside 
is over, through an old New England pasture, 



178 FAMILIAR WAYS 

full of unforgetable charm. By gray rocks 
covered with ancient lichen, by clumps of 
tall fern you go, climbing a broad slope past 
wild rose and barberry tangles. Blueberries, 
dim in color as this hill summit from our dis- 
tant home, grow here among the bay, and 
juniper, and sweet fern. You hold a few in 
your hand as you go climbing on, past the 
tiny sentinel cedars that dot the close grass, 
to a broad and gracious summit. You are 
higher than you thought. Miles and miles 
about you stretches the encompassing green 
country, with the silver line of the river, and 
the soft, deep-foliaged trees, out and out; 
the entire horizon is clear, in perfect circle. 
In the west lies the faint blue outline of dis- 
tant mountains, and between, slight ridges that 
the misty sunset finds, wave upon wave of 
land shining out toward the sky. It is silent, 
except for the tinkle of a cow-bell now and 
then, and the cawing of a hoarse old crow. 

Some of the roadsides about us are as neg- 
lected and as full of charm as if they did not 
know they are living in an era of landscape 



OLD TRAILS 179 

gardeners. Long grass sways by the fences ; 
wild grapevine, berry-bushes, woodbine tangle 
there; asters, white or purple, and tall, starry 
goldenrod nodding over fences still are spared 
us, by the grace of God and the forgetfulness 
of man. That highway whose invitation is 
ever before us charms by its onward direct- 
ness, its overshadowing trees, elms, oaks, 
and ancient maples, and by its bordering mead- 
ows. Neither gypsy caterpillars nor automo- 
biles have as yet destroyed it, though both 
are making progress. This highway, in all 
seasons, in all moods, we know, in sunlight, 
starlight, and in misty rain. Here, in a shel- 
tered hollow, spring comes earliest; over 
the half-hidden, sunny water one sees the 
delicate ripple of young leaves, myriad-tinted; 
trailing willow branches are there with their 
faint golden gleam, and red blossoms of the 
maple, all wearing the iridescent glory of 
April days. To the broad grassy meadows 
just beyond, in May, the bobolinks come home 
and build again, madly singing in the summer. 
On sleepy, sunshiny afternoons, so great 



180 FAMILIAR WAYS 

is the charm of these meadows, and the pale, 
indescribable green of the young wheat-field 
near, or its later golden grain, that you al- 
most forget the open road. A sense of warmth 
and rest and fulness of life possesses you ; you 
sit upon an " old gray stone " and doze in the 
sun, with the fragrance of pine in your nostrils ; 
then you waken with a start and trudge on. 

Still more compelling is the invitation of 
this highway in late evenings, in the damp- 
ness and wet fragrance of full summer. Every- 
thing calls one — the booming of the old frogs 
from the low, marshy pond, answering each 
other from under the great willows on opposite 
sides where they make their homes, reminding 
one of that other inspired frog pond not far 
away, where, in the very heart of academic 
shades, hylas sing first in the spring. Tree- 
toads are calling softly from shadowy trees 
close to the road, and the cheep of drowsy 
birds comes from unseen nests near by. Fire- 
flies everywhere lure one on; that field of 
wheat is full of them; so is the long grass 
where bobolinks are asleep. 



OLD TRAILS 181 

There is another road, whose lovehness at 
night behes a touch of sordidness it wears in 
the Hght of day. Here we go to see the stars, 
for it commands wide open spaces, — Orion, 
the Pole Star, the Corona Borealis, and the 
steady swing of our stride seems in unison with 
their steady swing. Common things take on 
a dim, mysterious beauty, lent by the fireflies 
and the star-shine. Through the soft dark- 
ness of the neighboring corn-field the tasseled 
tops shine like dull torches, as we stop to 
breathe in the sweetness of it all — the moist, 
cool sweetness. Would that John Keats might 
have smelled this of a summer night ! 

Something is always calling us from chair 
or hammock in our birch-trees' shade — the 
drifting flight of a butterfly, the beat of a 
swift bird's wing, floating bit of thistledown, 
or flower and driven leaf of autumn, sharing 
the wind's wild flight. I would not have the 
challenge of the distances find me lacking, 
nor discern heights or glimpses of far roads 
that I do not know. This sense of constant 
quest is but part of the eternal impulse which 



182 FAMILIAR WAYS 

we share with all the universe toward change 
and movement. It is well that radium — 
potent in modern surgery — has opened the 
minds of scientists to a suspicion that matter 
is but a form of energy, of motion, and that 
they begin to waken to an idea suggested by 
Greek philosophers more than two thousand 
years ago ! Great is the joy of moving where 
all things move; deep is the thrill of that 
sense of wide companionship that nothing 
escapes. The symbolism of the open road 
has always been our best and profoundest 
symbol; the "pilgrimage of man" suggests 
more potently than any other figure our lot 
between the cradle and the grave. There 
is an unescapable charm in feeling one's feet 
move slowly along the common highway; 
each step reaches back to our earliest beginning, 
and onward to one end, connecting our two 
ultimate selves. Something primeval perhaps 
lingers in it, a sense of those earliest stages 
when the animal found itself floating free from 
the old vegetable fixedness, in fearful joy of 
oozy motion; something too of the thrill of 



OLD TRAILS 183 

those first moments of ability to choose a 
path, the flash of the living will through the 
incipient stages of animal being. 

II 

The thought of one's primeval self suggests 
primeval process; there are walks hereabout 
that bear witness to the ceaseless growth, 
the stir and unrest, at the heart of apparently 
stable things. Such is the path about our 
little lake, through formal garden and through 
wild wood path by shelving shore, under 
overhanging trees, past jutting points where 
the reflected beauty of moss and tree ripples 
down into the water with exquisitely changing 
gradations. In its silent face you read eternal 
process, in the sunlit ripples at the edge, and in 
its utter smoothness, in the shimmer of young 
leaves in spring, and myriad blended shades 
of autumn, in reflection of floating cloud and 
flying wings. Never is it twice the same, 
whether it lie at early winter nightfall reflect- 
ing the deep gold of the western sky, bordered 
by the soft brown of its broken, wooded shores. 



184 FAMILIAR WAYS 

— the dusky, deepening shadows at the edge 
all gold-inwrought; or, spread out under 
the July sky, encompassed by rich summer 
foliage ; or, stretching out on its Avalon days 
of Indian summer, a silver shimmer of water 
under the silver haze that lends it a look of 
mystery and of endless distance. On the 
more rugged path about the upper lake, be- 
tween hemlock branches, we get glimpses of 
an irregular wild shore, and of secluded cor- 
ners overgrown with reeds and lily-pads. We 
know, for the wise have told us, that, through 
timeless and imperceptible nature process, our 
bright sheet of water is filling up from the 
other. Through the silence, we can almost 
hear 

" The moanings of the homeless sea, 

The sound of streams, that, swift, or slow, 
Draw down ^Eonian hills, and sow 
The dust of continents to be." 

This meadow, bravely keeping its ancient 
grace of waving grass, daisies, and buttercups 
under observatory and dormitory walls, was 
once a bit of lake bottom. Of the glacial 



OLD TRAILS 185 

action that determined the shape of our round- 
ing hills and wide sand plains, dim pictures 
form themselves in one's mind, but the "im- 
agination boggles at" that cold world of ice. 
Curiously interesting is the walk along the 
"esker", or bed of a glacial river. High, 
winding, with uniform wooded slopes below — 
you would think it an aqueduct but for the 
curves. You are with the tree-tops, touched 
with faint spring color or autumn-tinted, 
and you know, though you are far up in the 
air, that this is the bed of the most ancient 
type of river. You are going the way the 
water went uncounted years ago, under the 
slowly melting mass of ice, heaping up debris. 
The aqueduct in places would seem to be 
imitating the esker, save that it runs straight, 
at times with even, grassy slopes many feet 
high. Here it is carried over marshy stream 
or deep gully by stately Roman arches of 
gray stone, the dull Pompeian red of its brick 
walls fading and crumbling above the green, 
whence you see distant Pegan beyond grassy 
marsh and the winding river, forever flowing 



186 FAMILIAR WAYS 

softly between green banks or brown. All 
about, a network of aqueducts, converging 
cityward, afford for us and for other tramps 
alluring trails, with always a footpath run- 
ning through the grass, sometimes at a height, 
sometimes across a level meadow, most charm- 
ing of all when sunken and sheltered by high 
banks, where deep cutting was necessary to 
keep a level for the water. Here summer 
lingers into autumn, and autumn keeps winter 
out long after the highways are surrendered. 
Violets and low wild roses blossom along the 
slender trail; the gently sloping sides are 
clothed with gracious grass and fern; golden- 
rod, asters, sumac, and scrub-oak bring autumn 
glory there. 

For country near a large city, there is an 
amazing amount of woodland hereabout. 
Though much of it is second growth, and it 
lacks the deep solemnity of the ancient wood, 
it has the immemorial appeal of the forest, 
which is different from the appeal of anything 
else earth has to offer, more intimate, more 
subtle, perhaps going farther back. There 



OLD TRAILS 187 

are wood-roads here and there, deep ruts with 
grassy strips between ; you can walk for 
miles under delicate, translucent young leaves 
in spring, and see everywhere about the flame 
of green sunlight in ferns that light the shadowy 
corners. In autumn, the brown and red and 
gold, interlacing overhead, the slim tree-trunks, 
the tracery of branch and twig, recall, but 
with far greater beauty, the glory of living 
color of the Sainte Chapelle. Here one is 
aware, more deeply than anywhere else, of 
eternal process, stir, and change, at nature's 
very heart. Some rustle across the stillness 
brings constantly a sense of encompassing life. 

" Enter these enchanted woods. 
You who dare. 

Here the snake across your path 
Stretches in his golden bath ; 
Mossy-footed squirrels leap, 
Soft as winnowing plumes of sleep. 

Change, the strongest son of Life, 
Has the Spirit here to wife." 

If you wish a companion for your way- 
faring, perhaps you seek this little river that 
goes gently, with innumerable twists and 



188 FAMILIAR WAYS 

windings, toward the sea. From the highway 
you pass through an opening, once guarded 
by a pair of bars; you follow, through a low 
bit of meadowland, a road deep grown with 
grass, daisies, and buttercups blossoming at 
the side and between. Under the aqueduct, 
beyond the tall grasses of the marsh, where 
wild blue iris grows, beyond the reeds and 
rushes, you find the river, the slow little river, 
the laziest stream in all the world, outside of 
England. It is, of all the rivers in existence, 
the one for those divided in their minds, not 
knowing whether to go or to stay at home. 
It flows gently past its mossy, wooded banks, 
so full of reflections of birch and maple, pine 
and dogwood, that it must almost think itself 
a forest, with so untroubled, so clear a sur- 
face that you cannot tell, by looking, which 
way the current goes, and the floating leaves 
give little aid. This is because of the many 
curves and turnings ; it goes back on its course 
again and again. Opposite lies a great estate, 
once open to the wayfarer, now, alas ! closed, 
with miles of magic, tree-bordered driveway. 



OLD TRAILS 189 

" Five miles, meandering with a mazy motion, 
Through wood and dale the sacred river r^n," 

and still does, I fancy. Sacred ? Of course ! 
Is it not the river Charles ? 

It is an enchanting stream, gracious, com- 
panionable. In spring and autumn, canoes 
with young men in white flannels and girls 
in flower-hued garments float down it; and 
boats go by bearing proud parents, happy 
children, and happier dogs. The path skirts 
the shore closely, through beds of fern, past 
wild honeysuckle and tangled vines, up a little 
slope fragrant with pine. You reach at last a 
beautiful pine wood, with its fragrances, its 
brown bed of needles, its "sunny spots of 
greenery ", and here you stop, letting the river 
ripple on through wood and meadow to the 
sea. 

So we keep moving, moving, in spite of the 
enticement of the threshold, the immemorial 
desire to wander being ever with us, the need 
of being up and away. This slow progression 
sets mind and spirit free; you walk out of 
old worries, old tangles, into fine freedom. 



190 FAMILIAR WAYS 

And the joy, the sheer joy of going on ! Beauty 
is greater because you pass and go ; the charm 
of the wild rose that you see but once haunts 
you endlessly. The sting, the challenge, the 
potency of change have deeper cause than we 
know for so commanding us. If each step 
reaches back through eons of life to the very 
threshold of being, it reaches forward still 
more endlessly. Each onward footstep brings 
its thrill; it is one footstep nearer the goal, 
and seems at times to be about to touch the 
very outer edge of mystery. 

The most appealing path is no path at all, 
but a bit of open country, where high slopes 
with softly swelling hills and hollows stretch 
out like a bit of the Wiltshire downs. In the 
bottomlands below, the river comes nearest 
us, and here lies a sunken meadow, safe and 
hidden; automobilists cannot see it as they 
speed along the highway, for on one side it 
is wood-sheltered, on the other guarded by 
the gently rounding hills. It is beloved by 
birds and butterflies, by fireflies, crickets, 
and by us. Most of all we love it at the fold- 



OLD TRAILS 191 

ing-time of the birds, when we pace the even 
green and hear the good-night chirping, with 
the gurgle of the frogs, and the "noiseless 
noise" of slow water. This, like the upper 
slopes, is covered by smooth short grass, with 
the gold of close-clinging buttercups every- 
where, tiniest daisies, and reddening sorrel 
tints. Like much of New England, it has 
no luxuriance of vegetation, but a spare and 
delicate beauty, wrought by nature in one of 
her fine, ascetic moods ; yet the soft hollows 
of the downs keep all winter, under the snow, 
the freshness of living grass, and the first 
flush of pale green in earliest spring over hill 
and hollow has enchantment that I find no- 
where else. 

I know the way I shall take, when the last 
moment comes. Not by the highway shall 
my feet fare forth, nor any main-travelled 
road; not by aeroplane or motor, but afoot 
and alone, under the wide-branching oak, 
over the brow of the little hill, dipping into 
the hollow, by the half-hidden path bordered 
by sweet fern and the least goldenrod, up the 



192 FAMILIAR WAYS 

broader slope where the world opens out to 
westward. Bare hill and hollow, stretching 
on and on; trees beyond trees; a glimpse of 
the lake, and beyond — the red-brown bars 
of sunset. It would seem but an easy step 
from this world to a fairer — if indeed any 
could be more fair, which I doubt. 



THE FINAL PACKING 

As I jog on in years, by comfortable stages 
and slow, more and more often the old figure, 
favorite of poets and of moralists, comes back 
to me, of life as a journey wherein, whether 
one will or no, one must keep moving on. 
This increasing sense of perpetual adventure 
brings its own delight; on the other hand, 
more troublesome becomes that deep feeling 
of possession of things that impede a journey 
and hamper one in the eternal wayfaring. 
If I recapture at times something of that joyous 
mood with which I undertook my first journey 
to Italy, with an absurd, illogical intimation 
of likeness in the destination, there comes back 
too that old realization of the need of mini- 
mizing my personal possessions — taking then, 
I remember, the form of a conviction that, 
for the brief journey, I must carry nothing 

193 



194 FAMILIAR WAYS 

that would not go into a huge extension bag. 
It is good to pack and travel now and then 
the ways of earth, because one must perforce 
sort over old possessions, letting the less worthy 
go; even here one cannot take one's all. If 
this task proves puzzling, what of the final 
sifting and selecting, the spiritual house-clean- 
ing that must come before the ultimate packing ? 
At the outset I find myself hampered in 
my setting forth; I have lived so long with 
this earthly furniture, have grown so fond of 
it, that I am loath to start for any region 
whatsoever to which I cannot take it. My 
father's desk, my mother's great gilt mirror, 
my grandmother's rush-bottomed rocking-chair 
— the passing years and the care I give these 
things but tighten their hold upon me. I 
sit and watch my treasures, wondering. The 
Baluchistan rug, with the leopard-skin pat- 
tern; the Herati; the hangings with the 
pomegranate pattern, deep red and deeper 
blue, secretly darned in many places by my 
devoted fingers — how shall I let them go ? 
What those do who really have great pos- 



THE FINAL PACKING 195 

sessions I can but conjecture, yet I suppose 
that, as the number increases, the intensity 
of the grasp lessens; the human hand, after 
all, cannot hold more than it can hold. These 
insistent household furnishings — it would not 
do to sell them, or to give them away; they 
would but trouble me the more, for nothing 
looms so large as joy or possession foregone. 
Here, I sometimes forget them, but were they 
gone beyond my walls I could not get them 
out of my mind with longing for them back. 
There is the trouble — they get into the 
wrong place ! I leave them in living-room 
and dining-room; I find them in the secret, 
inner chambers of immaterial me. My house 
of wood was built large enough for all that 
it must shelter; house room I have; my 
difficulty is in finding mind room for my goods 
and chattels, for they take more space than 
I would have them. Amphibian as we are 
between flesh and spirit, as old Sir Thomas 
Browne used to say, what shall I do when 
the time draws near when I must choose my 
element? I cannot go carrying my rugs, 



196 FAMILIAR WAYS 

like an old Armenian pedler, along that nar- 
rowest way, yet my mind is full of these things, 
and I hope to take that with me. I do not 
like the way my fingers cling to the little 
mahogany table; there will be difficulty in 
making them let go. The thought of the 
highboy at the gates of heaven troubles me; 
tug and tug as I will, I cannot get it through. 
There is some excuse for these preposses- 
sions, for many of these articles have, through 
long association, ceased to be mere bits of fur- 
niture and have become embodied emotions, 
memories, states of mind. That aforesaid 
desk — it is not its deep rich red-brown of old 
black walnut that holds me, nor its fine, severe 
contours; it is the personality that called it 
into being; its dignity, its silences are my 
father's own. It gives the same infrequent, 
grave reproofs; it seems now and then to 
burst into deep, uncontrollable, shaking laugh- 
ter, the unquenchable laughter of the Homeric 
gods. It is no mere object, but a something 
fashioned for my father's needs, something 
that became himself ! 



THE FINAL PACKING 197 

The old daguerreotypes — it is easy to think 
of them as half-way between the spirit world 
and the material, in the elusive charm, face, 
expression, evading you always in whimsical 
fashion until just the right light, just the 
right angle, wins a moment's vision. Slim- 
waisted, erect, with parted waving hair de- 
murely brushed behind their ears, in charming, 
old-fashioned, surpliced gowns of flowered 
muslin that they made themselves, my mother 
and her sister, smiling out upon the world, 
before trouble came, before we came — is this 
a mere material property, may I ask, or is it 
strange that I should hate to leave it behind? 
Or this, which is no daguerreotype, but always 
a moment's fit of mirth — this now triumphant 
and masterful leader in the suffrage movement, 
at six years old, in low-necked dress, curls 
hanging at each side of her pretty head, her 
bashful finger in her mouth? And that old 
mirror, which has reflected the few weddings, 
the many funerals, is to me no mere object; 
it is a record of faces, illumined faces, grief- 
stricken it may be, but holding the high ex- 



198 FAMILIAR WAYS 

pression of fine insight that comes, perhaps, 
but seldom, and most surely through sorrow. 
If we are amphibian between flesh and spirit 
— what, pray, is this, with its unfading re- 
flection of pure soul? 

And these books — they seem to be tangible 
things upon my shelves; I turn the yellowing 
leaves and see quaint pictures, fragrances 
of old days come to me. They seem to be 
tangible things, but they are breathless mo- 
ments of wonder at new beauty. The Cole- 
ridge, the Keats are indeed 

" Magic casements opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." 

They are whole enchanted days of mirth, of 
tragic suffering, for the old leather-bound 
Shakespeare, despite its wickedly small print 
and its absurd pseudo-classic illustrations, 
meant the anticipatory sting and thrill of life 
itself. These books are not things; they are 
not mere possessions; they are moments of 
aspiration, of struggle, of victory or defeat: 
for "a good book is but the precious life-blood 
of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured 



THE FINAL PACKING 199 

up on purpose to a life beyond life." Surely, 
nothing in the relation of soul to body is a 
deeper mystery than this marvel of the trans- 
mission of the spiritual through mere material 
devices of paper and printer's ink. Child- 
fingers touch the leaves, and there flows in 
upon the young spirit the splendor of those 
who vanished long ago from sight and sense. 
Through them 'the vision and the passion of 
old prophets, of old poets, is alive and quick 
in all of us to-day. I have no sense of real 
loss in leaving these books behind; they are 
translated and transmuted into inmost me. 
There is one I would fain take with me, so 
thin, so slender in its austere black cover that 
I could almost, I think, smuggle it over the 
border line that separates the visible from the 
invisible, the old Sartor Resartus, which I 
used to learn by heart as if it were poetry. 
I cannot hear its name to-day without a sudden 
leaping of the soul, a thrill in the blood. 

Great as is the diflBculty about the material 
or so-called material things, greater still is 



200 FAMILIAR WAYS 

the difficulty in getting ready my purely 
mental luggage for that last long journey. 
What have I in the way of intellectual and 
spiritual furnishing that those celestial cus- 
toms will permit to pass ? How much must 
be thrown from me shred by shred that I may 
go in? 

This silent, thoughtful, ironic, watching ten- 
dency, may that go with me through the di- 
vine adventure as it has through the earthly ? 
I could not help it ; it was bestowed upon me ; 
one must not throw one's father's gifts away. 
If it has meant at times, through fear of doing 
harm, a lack of radiant, immediate, feminine 
interference with things ; if its hesitations have 
been, perhaps, incomplete without that beard to 
stroke, slowly and more slowly, still, if it has 
been in many ways a poor thing, it yet has 
been mine own, and I know not how to fare 
forth without it. I can only trust that with 
it came something of its old accompaniment, 
that sad sincerity of honest act that ran stead- 
fastly through all questioning of God and doubt 
of man. 



THE FINAL PACKING 201 

And that quick humor, that "sense of sud- 
den glory ", at keen thrust of wit or revelation 
of incongruity in things — did he take that 
with him, and did he get it through the narrow 
gate? I cannot think of him without it; for 
him endless existence would be flat and tame 
were it gone. Surely, lacking this, that silent 
power of thought deep within himself could 
not get the full savor of what is to come, for 
life — and Shakespeare — prove that the deep- 
est significance of any experience may not be 
without the penetration of humor. 

I think of other inheritances — my mother's 
ready hospitable instinct — may that go with 
me in my extension soul? Without it, how 
could I get used to the hosts of saints and of 
angels — Michael, Gabriel, and Presbyterians 
all, with whom my childhood was instructed, 
heaven is peopled; those neighbors of eternity 
whose acquaintance I have sometimes dreaded ? 
This instinct has been intermittently my own, 
but with a difference. With her, by some 
survival of Scotch-clan feeling, it concerned 
all relatives however remote, and was con- 



202 FAMILIAR WAYS 

nected with thoughts of bed and board; with 
me, it concerns strangers, the more unknown 
the better, and is evinced by swift, mute 
question as to how far they have solved the 
mystery that baffles us all. Wayfarers whom 
I meet for an instant on railway-car or avenue, 
friendly beggars, faces that I see but once 
and understand — surely Michael, Gabriel, 
and all Presbyterians cannot be so much 
stranger than those with whom I have in a 
minute's flash of sympathy made friends. 

And that maternal passion of faith : as I 
trudge on with staff and scrip, I think that 
some small part of this — would that it might 
have been Benjamin's share, for I was the 
youngest — is mine. Yet the heaviest articles 
of that Scotch creed I can neither lift nor carry. 
How could I bear them across the heavenly 
hills, who could not hold them here? I re- 
member with pity how hard a burden for 
frail old age became that thought of endless 
punishment and the stern image of a right- 
eous judge, and I try to imagine that sudden 
sense of lightness and of joy with which they 



THE FINAL PACKING 203 

were dropped at the great portal, while the 
soul passed through without them. 

Going on with my inventory, I find that, 
after all, there is not much to take. The old 
longings, ambitions, even some of the con- 
scientious scruples seem to fall away. As 
one weighs in the hands in packing before 
the open hand-bag this garment or that, 
pondering whether it should go in, I sit and 
weigh many things, inherited and acquired, 
realizing with relief that they may be left 
behind. I shall indeed travel light ! Dim 
stirrings of memory in regard to the resources 
of London and of Paris with respect to a new 
outfit at the journey's end blend, not blas- 
phemously, but figuratively, in joyous fore- 
taste, with far-off promises in regard to mak- 
ing all things new. The mental accumulation 
of all these years, information in regard to 
this or that, conscientiously acquired, as con- 
scientiously shared — the business of a life- 
time — how gladly do I throw it all away ! 
They are useless, these facts, and wholly of 
earth; in all this pile there are no charts and 



204 FAMILIAR WAYS 

maps of celestial geography that may help me 
now. Not with one's old notebooks does one 
enter a new country, but with wide-opened 
eyes. I want no cold mental stores with 
which to go on; I cannot be hampered with 
mere dates and summaries and ideas. It is 
with a fresh mind that I must start, a fresh 
sense of adventure, as of a schoolboy who has 
his books away. Even the philosophers I 
shall leave behind — how gladly, at the outer 
confines of Space and of Time, shall I say 
farewell to them, for I am tired of trying to 
think, and thinking space and time is weari- 
some ! The poets I shall carry a bit farther : 
Shakespeare, Shelley, Browning sing songs 
at heaven's gate. I seem to divine that, of 
all one's mental furnishings, the reasoned 
formulae, like the facts, shall not linger. Only 
the spiritual impulse, the quickening mood, the 
leaping flame of mind and of spirit shall persist. 
Pondering on that last journey, the old 
figure of the wayfarer becomes the figure of 
the runner; one can take but the swiftness 
in one's feet, the soul's deep courage, the en- 



THE FINAL PACKING 205 

ergy within as one speeds toward that goal. 
Not even that most cherished property, one's 
high-piled deeds of good, and charities, if 
such there be, may go; only the impulse that 
led to them, the pity, the sympathy with man 
and beast. I begin to discern a more pro- 
found significance than I had dreamed in the 
rules of that far Inn, so different from those 
of the inns of earth, in refusing to admit any 
luggage at all, instead of refusing those who 
come without. The old warning that having 
all we lose all; the simple statement that, 
as we brought nothing into this world, we can 
take nothing away, become the clew to some 
dim knowledge of the immortal in us — the 
inner vitality of mind and of soul, the quick- 
ening intellectual aspiration, the quickening 
sympathy. That which went out from one, 
not that which one tried to save; that energy 
of creative love that gives, not asks — this is 
the purely spiritual part of one, and one's only 
real possession. This is the secret of our 
going stripped and empty-handed through 
heaven's gate. 



206 FAMILIAR WAYS 

So I sit and review my belongings, material, 
mental, spiritual, aware afresh, in this eternal 
paradox of things, that I may keep only that 
which I did not try to keep; that the secret 
of holding, in death as in life, is in letting go. 



